When William “Trey” Owens, a Black restaurant owner in Richmond, Virginia, opened JewFro, it felt both personal and political.
The idea for the restaurant emerged in Owens’ mind in 2020, after comedian and television host Nick Cannon was fired from his own show after making antisemitic comments. Owens—who already co-owned the city’s popular Soul Taco restaurants with Jewish chef Ari Augenbaum, and business partner Nar Hovnanian—compared it to a That’s So Raven flash of vision. The restaurant would be a way, as he saw it, to “bridge the gap” between Black and Jewish communities.
JewFro started as a pop-up and then, due to demand, opened as a brick-and-mortar space in late 2021, pairing food from both the African continent and the Jewish diaspora. An embodiment of the city’s roots and a striking creative project, JewFro has been so popular that the team is already planning a second location in Raleigh, North Carolina.
“How can we bring people together to open up this conversation more?” Owens recalls asking himself. “I thought we should do a pop-up of Jewish and African food together and show how the similarities are there, and really start talking about what we all have in common, as opposed to what separates us and divides us.”
Owens and Augenbaum, who is white, had already talked at length about racism within predominantly white American Jewish communities, and antisemitism among some Black Americans. After Cannon’s comments went viral, Owens saw a need for additional dialogue rather than knee-jerk condemnation and hoped to foster that conversation through food.
In some respects, JewFro aims to mirror the relationship of the restaurant’s owners, who work to find common ground despite opinions that sometimes clash. “We all come from groups of people that have been persecuted in the past,” says Hovnanian, who is Armenian and Middle Eastern. “We start talking to each other and you get these perspectives that you may not have had exposure to before.”
JewFro is hardly the first or only project designed to unite Black and Jewish communities in the United States. Jews of color have frequently been at the forefront of these efforts, and Black-Jewish unity Passover seders are common throughout the country. JewFro’s owners aren’t the only ones exploring commonalities between the foods of Jewish and African diasporas, either—Author Michael W. Twitty, whose forthcoming book is titled Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew, has long written about the experience of being Black and Jewish. But JewFro does appear to be the first attempt to turn this interplay into a restaurant.
Opened in late 2021 in Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom neighborhood and surrounded by nightclubs near the city center, JewFro offers a wide array of options. Some dishes are recognizably Jewish, with an African influence, while others offer the reverse.
Here, the Jewish deli workhorse pastrami on rye comes with a slaw seasoned with a ras el hanout spice blend, giving it a welcome depth. Augenbaum adds small latke crisps for texture, and the sandwich comes with mustard bolstered by Ethiopian mulled honey wine. It’s clearly still the deli classic despite the adaptations, heaped with a pile of fall-apart, purple-hued pastrami. And by serving South African peri-peri chicken on a fluffy braided challah bun, Augenbaum cuts some of the heat of awaze hot sauce, an Ethiopian spice-and-oil blend the menu compares to Nashville Hot–style. The cloudlike challah soaks up any oil dripping off the spicy chicken, making it more satisfying after a few moments on the plate. A gefilte fish crudo evokes the flavors of the Eastern European Jewish dish. For many, that classic Jewish staple, made of ground white fish, is too gelatinous, too gray, or too drowned in horseradish to be appetizing. Here, whole pieces of rockfish and dollops of horseradish foam are cut with pickled shaved carrots and roasted beets.
Richmond is a natural birthplace for a restaurant like JewFro. The former capital of the Confederacy relied heavily on an industry of slavery, which primarily operated in what is now JewFro’s neighborhood. As early as 1790, Richmond boasted the fourth largest Jewish population in the country, according to the Jewish Virtual Library. The local Jewish community’s relationship to Black residents has long been fraught. An estimated 75% of Jews in Richmond owned enslaved Africans at the beginning of the Civil War. Particularly after the Holocaust, Jews in Richmond stepped up their support of civil rights, but already facing discrimination and fearing a backlash, they often did so behind the scenes, according to the Virginia Center for Digital History.
Today, Richmond’s population is almost 50% Black, including small communities of African immigrants. It’s also home to a modest but active Jewish community. JewFro isn’t the only local effort to address the two group’s shared histories; the Jewish Community Federation of Richmond partnered with organizations like the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia on an educational program about Jews in the Civil Rights Movement last Black History Month, for example. But the restaurant is arguably the most visible and ongoing attempt to foster cross-cultural relations between Black and Jewish communities in this city.
Before JewFro opened, there were already restaurants serving Jewish or African food in Richmond, of course. Locals love Perly’s Deli, Africanne on Main, and Nile, among others. With JewFro, Owens and his partners are getting at something else—a crossover that expands the bounds of the cuisines it encompasses.
Doing things differently has required education, including for diners—and sometimes even family—with strong feelings about their favorite foods. Augenbaum’s own grandfather couldn’t believe the restaurant was charging $18 for chopped liver, a traditionally modest and affordable dish in Ashkenazi Jewish communities that Augenbaum makes with the inclusion of foie gras.
By pulling from a range of cultures, yet diverging from all of them, JewFro aims to offer an experience that forces diners to think beyond easy narratives. That begins with the restaurant’s potentially loaded name, which some locals aren’t sure how to interpret, and continues with the menu, which includes a glossary explaining that “kishka” is a Jewish sausage made with schmaltz, and “dukkah” is an Egyptian nut and spice blend.
There’s nothing traditionally Jewish or African about JewFro’s approach. That’s exactly the point. “Our goal is to remind you of the thing you’re familiar with, but do it in a way that’s new,” Hovnanian says. “People are really excited about it after they get over the initial shock of ‘What is this place?’”
For many Richmonders who have flocked to the restaurant, JewFro’s unconventional approach is refreshing. James Millner, the program director for Diversity Richmond and director of Virginia Pride, is grateful that JewFro is making people pause. “It is so intentional in pushing people outside of their comfort zones and creating concepts that are unapologetically Black, unapologetically soulful,” Millner says. Months after his meal, he’s left thinking about the Ghanaian peanut soup his friend ordered. He giddily polished it off in part because it felt like a reinvention of peanut soups he’d encountered in southeastern Virginia as a child.
“One of the things they’re trying to subtly do with this restaurant is let people understand that the things that we consider traditionally Virginian perhaps in many ways—or Southern—are influences from enslaved persons who came from Africa and who brought food traditions with them,” Millner says.
It’s been a learning experience for the owners too, Owens says. Looking into his own ancestry, he found that it stopped at a slave ship, without further context on which country his family came from. JewFro has offered Owens a chance to explore his roots through creating menu items and meeting customers excited to share their own experiences. A small group of Black Jews recently stopped in, fresh off a trip to several West African countries, and regaled Owens with stories of their travels.
Like Millner, Owens grew up eating peanut soup, though he didn’t like it as a child. “I had it coming up, and I just remember that I didn’t particularly care for it,” he says. “I loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches so much, but the taste of peanut butter any other way was like ‘oh no, this ain’t it.’” The version of JewFro won him over. And therein lies the restaurant’s magic: that something can be at once familiar and distinct, grounded in history and yet decidedly fresh. That balance is important to Owens, having grown up in this city with such a fraught and violent racial history. Now, the restaurateurs hope, JewFro can be a catalyst for altering the city’s trajectory.
“I think it’s important that [JewFro] started here, because this is where a lot of the African influence on this nation really came from,” Owens says. “To me, this is bigger than Richmond.”