There are build-your-own-bowl restaurants that encourage customers to make mountains out of carne asada and shredded cheese. Salad bowl shops, places that push bowls filled with Mediterranean spreads and grains, and bowls brimming with açaí under tiles of sliced banana. Dubbed “slop bowls” online, you dig a fork into a sea of colorful but texturally homogeneous ingredients and call it lunch.
Restaurant owner Jinell Singletary is familiar with slop bowls. She spent years visiting restaurants that specialized in customizable bowls, but she never felt connected to the food.
“I needed something that was going to have nutritional value in a way that was relevant to me culturally,” she said.
Head chef Edward Hamilton, left, owner Jinell Singletary and chef Chris Fordham at Urban Comfort Foods Kitchen in Carson.
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times )
At the time, the former tech industry veteran was doing admin for her aunt’s Los Angeles-based catering company, which provided hundreds of meals for seniors, students and unhoused people. Without any culinary training of her own, she called chef Edward Hamilton, and told him she had an idea.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be really cool if we had like a Cava, build-your-own bowl model for African diaspora cuisine from around the world that centered around Black culture?” she said.
In October, they opened Urban Comfort Foods Kitchen in a strip mall in Carson. The setup is similar to that of Chipotle or Cava, with different sized bowls you fill with dozens of proteins and vegetables. Only the rice is jollof, and the proteins include suya-spiced beef, brown stew jackfruit and Cajun barbecue chicken.
“There is such a rich culture in the Americas of Black food that I don’t think gets its due,” said Hamilton, who spent time cooking at Alta Adams in West Adams and at Nick and Stef’s steakhouse before taking the head chef role at Urban Comfort Foods Kitchen. “I’m also incorporating flavors from Trinidad and West Africa. A lot of the flavors I grew up on in the States with my great-grandmother’s and grandmother’s cooking.”
Hamilton’s suya beef transforms the Nigerian beef skewers into bite-sized chunks of steak cooked on an open flame. They’re garlicky, nutty and smoky with a heat level that’s faint but ever present. The jerk chicken is rubbed in a sweet honey glaze. Fillets of salmon are coated in a savory, aromatic blend of South African and Cajun spices. The island garlic shrimp gets a sweet and tangy edge from the addition of tamarind.
There are six bowl bases to choose from, with kale and avocado salad and garlic rosemary roasted potatoes, but the jollof rice quickly emerged as the favorite. Hamilton described his version as landing somewhere between Senegalese and Ghanaian, cooked in a slurry of roasted red peppers, tomatoes and onions, delicately spiced and with a whisper of smoke.
The restaurant has assembled a toppings bar that includes a whopping 20 choices, with things like braised collard greens, bourbon sweet potatoes, jalapeño cornbread croutons, grilled okra and shito pepper jam. Customers are encouraged to build their own bowls from the plethora of choices. I tend to revel in the options. If it feels a little overwhelming, Hamilton offers eight composed signature bowls.
The Jollof Heatwave bowl from Urban Comfort Foods in Carson.
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times )
The Jollof Heatwave hums with the heat of suya spiced beef, pepper chow and shito pepper jam, with plenty of crunchy fried garlic and shallots over the top. The Diaspora Delight is another favorite, with a fillet of blackened salmon surrounded by buffalo Brussels sprouts, braised collard greens and bourbon sweet potatoes under a zigzag of green goddess dressing and a handful of chicken andouille bites and fried garlic.
Far from slop, this is the glow-up the lunch bowl deserves.
Singletary is already looking to expand the Carson location, which mostly operates as a take-out operation. And though the restaurant has been an early success, it’s only one part of her Urban Comfort Foods Foundation umbrella.
At a commercial kitchen in Los Angeles, she facilitates the preparation of three meals a day, seven days a week, for 600 people. Funding is provided by various contracts with nonprofits and local governments, with meal drops at 17 shelters around Los Angeles. Her staff at the restaurant can often be found in the commercial kitchen, preparing meals for the shelters.
Singeltary plans to keep the meal preps going while she brings the restaurant to other areas of the city. And she has her eye on Inglewood.
“I was born in Watts and raised in Inglewood,” she said. “This is something unique that we feel our community deserves. We call our customers kin. And that’s how we treat them.”
