My Everyday Lagos

Welcome to Lagos

My flight to Lagos arrives at dusk, and I slide out to an airport buzzing with activity, commerce, and community. For me, it s also a confusion of crowds after the stillness of a thirteen-hour flight. Once I am in the car, driving to my parents house, I can see shadows along the roadside, forms emerging from the headlights edges and plunging back into the darkness. Lagos is a city by the sea, a city with a distinct coastline, islands both natural and man-made, and a never-ending expansion toward what we call the mainland. Any benefits of an Atlantic Ocean breeze are swallowed up a few miles into the mainland s humidity. Wherever you are in Lagos, the streets are never silent and never still. A quick glance and all seems calm. But when I look out those car windows into the night, people are filling up the dark like a tide rolling in and receding. They re striding, chatting in groups, gathering by a food stand on the edge of a streetlight s glow. They are carrying the city, still bursting with energy and life, steadily into the middle of the night.
As we come up Adeniyi Jones Road, to the small enclave of houses where my parents live, my mother points out landmarks from my childhood. None are immediately recognizable, but her voice is all the familiarity I need: I m strangely, and impossibly, home. I breathe in the air and feel every inch of my person expand. We step out of the car and are greeted by the heat, the gorgeous glow of old incandescent bulbs in faded sconces, and the foliage filling every spare inch of our yard. Lemongrass, wild oregano, and scent leaf fill the air as I walk up to the front door.
My parents home in Ikeja, Lagos, is a green oasis built with concrete and glass. From the dining room I can make out the shape of a banana tree in the corner of the garden. Bright yellow star fruit hang low on another tree. Everything is ripe and ready for picking. I hear chickens clucking, settling in for the

Yewande Komolafe is a Berlin-born, Lagos-raised food writer, recipe developer, and food stylist based in Brooklyn. Her professional career began as a pastry cook in classic French pastry kitchens. She moved on to work in fine dining restaurants in Atlanta and New York, where she was one of the first employees of Momofuku Milk Bar. Yewande’s writing and recipes have appeared in the New York Times, Whetstone, Food & Wine, Munchies, and the books Sheetpan Chicken by Cathy Erway for TASTE and Lindsay Gardner’s Why We Cook. Yewande has also appeared on a James Beard Award–nominated episode of The Sporkful, WNYC’s All of It with Alison Stewart, and Milk Street Radio with Christopher Kimball.