Hamisi Mamba grew up in Burundi, a small East African country between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania.

When he was a kid, his mom owned a small restaurant.

There, he learned to cook and overtime, it became a passion.

But Hamisi's mom didn't want him following in her footsteps.

My mom didn't want me to stand the kitchen and cook and to be a chef. She didn't want that.

Then she was like, go to school, find a degree, I don't want you to do the job that I'm doing.

So as he got older, Hamisi Mamba decided he would go to business school instead of becoming a chef.

But as Hamisi came into adulthood, Burundi was going through a lot of political turmoil.

There was even a civil war.

The tension in their home country led to Hamisi and his wife Nadia seeking asylum in the US and eventually making a home for themselves in Detroit.

There, as an asylum seeker trying to find his way in a strange new world,

Chef Mamba leaned on what he knew best to make it in America.

He and his wife together created Bawa Bab Fair, a restaurant not just serving up the most delicious plates East African cuisine has to offer,

but also dedicated to improving the lives of people in Detroit and in Burundi.

So the intention is like, you come in and it's like, hmm, either this is Detroit or this is Africa we can tell.

My name is Baudelaire and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible and wondrous places.

Today, we go to Detroit to hear the story of Chef Mamba in Bawa Bab Fair, a small slice of Burundi nestled in the motorcy.

More after this.

There were two driving forces that led Hamisi and Nadia Mamba to start their restaurant Bawa Bab Fair a few years after he arrived in Detroit.

The first being that they weren't so into the food scene.

The second Detroit is more than 75 percent black, you know, why we have black people and we don't have African food.

Detroit's African food scene exists, but the African food that is there is mostly Ethiopian or West African.

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