Julia Gham was seven months pregnant, with a toddler and just $100 to her name in 2015 when the financing for her restaurant fell through. For ten years she’d had multiple jobs—slinging ice cream, working hotel gigs, driving a cab—preparing an ambitious business plan to open a spot specializing in the food of her native Cameroon. Just as she’d attracted enough backing to make it happen, an angry text from her jealous fiancé scared off her investors.
At 19, Gham moved to Germany for five years and cooked in Turkish, Italian, and Chinese restaurants. “I learned a lot and I wanted to take that to my mom’s restaurant to make a few changes, and I thought it would be nice to have a Cameroonian restaurant out in the west.” She settled on Chicago for its diversity, and in 2005 got her first job stateside at Ghiradelli on the Mag Mile. She also started hosting house parties at her condo and cooking for homesick African friends—jollof rice, egusi soup, ndole.
Many of these stewy dishes are served with some form of fufu, which in Cameroon doesn’t just mean doughy orbs of elastic pummeled yam, but any kind of pounded starch—corn, cassava, cocoyam, even oatmeal. Gham knows precisely which variety goes with which dish (corn with ndole, yam with egusi), and every month or so she hosts pounding parties where folks gather to thrash these starches into their simultaneously hearty but buoyant textures.
2113 S. State 312-285-2890thepowerhouseil.com
