How Baltimore’s Jollof Bowl went from viral videos to a Food Network show

When the email came in February, Andrea Kamara-Oketunji and her husband Lekan Oketunji’s first instinct was to ignore it.

The duo behind the fast-casual restaurant Jollof Bowl had spent months fielding messages from small-time influencers looking to try their food for pay after videos of their West African cuisine went viral. When a producer from a Food Network show reached out, the couple figured it was the same.

“We’re like, ‘Oh boy, here they go again,’” Oketunji said. “How much are they gonna ask us for?”

After a round of background checks, the couple confirmed the offer was the real deal and they were headed to Season 19 of “The Great Food Truck Race,” which debuted Sunday night.

Though their eatery in Federal Hill’s Cross Street Market has been open for less than a year, Jollof Bowl has solidified its status as a viral sensation.

A month after their July opening, a customer posted a video to social media and lines began forming out the door. Another video described the food as “viral African Chipotle,” with its bowls of jollof rice or noodles, meats and customers’ choice of toppings.

“It seemed like every other month we were going viral,” Oketunji said. “And it’s kind of continuing to snowball until we got this opportunity.”

Although the fast timeline was unusual, for Kamara-Oketunji, it wasn’t improbable.

Jollof Bowl is her fourth restaurant concept and Oketunji‘s second.

The two built the business around systems designed to survive the kind of chaos virality can bring. Stews are batch-cooked and meats marinated ahead of time, and the jollof rice is finished in 30 minutes because the labor-intensive parts are already done.

“Things that I think would have broken an average new restaurant didn’t break us because we had that experience before, and we knew that you had to have these systems in place,” Kamara-Oketunji said.

Those systems and a reliable staff are what allowed the couple to leave their home and Jollof Bowl for a month without the business falling apart. Kamara-Oketunji still ran payroll every Friday from the road.

When producers first called about a competition based on food trucks, the couple did not own nor had they ever operated one, though they did have plans to buy one and expand Jollof Bowl to a mobile concept.

On the show, the two learned to use the truck’s generator and equipment and how to cook in a small space together.

“This show was essentially our one-month training,” Kamara-Oketunji said. “Now we’ve been running our food truck since the day we came home.”

The couple said being filmed for a national audience in a competition environment was a different type of pressure than blowing up on social media.

“We definitely had moments where we were very vulnerable, and we had to kind of like lean on each other or beat each other up,” Kamara-Oketunji said.

Kamara-Oketunji’s mother, Ethel Kamara, competed alongside them.

“We are oil and water, but we do mix from time to time and it was an experience,” Kamara said. “It was great seeing her work with me under pressure, and I’m not the easiest person on this earth to work with.”

Underneath the competition, the couple described a more deliberate mission: using a national platform to push West African food past the point of being treated as a novelty.

“Our main goal is to normalize West African cuisine,” Oketunji said. “The same way you don’t blink when you hear ‘fries’ because it’s just food, we want Jollof Bowl to be the entry point.”

Jollof Bowl is expanding beyond Baltimore. A second flagship location is under construction on the University of Maryland, College Park, campus, with a target opening of the fall.

For now, Oketunji is planning on watching every “The Great Food Truck Race” episode “five times over.”

“To get the attention of a national platform was just a godsend because everybody hopes to be on a global stage, and being on Food Network is definitely a step in putting us on the platform to go global,” Oketunji said.