Walking around Dakar you will see makeshift tents at every street corner, tied to poles, so that they kind of make a “room”. It is the gargottes, little low-profile restaurants with only a table and a few benches, where you can have breakfast (sandwiches with eggs, spaghetti, liver and peas or onion sauce) and lunch (the ubiquitous and indispensable rice-based today’s special) for a few hundred francs (around 1,50€).
Until maybe twenty years ago, it was unthinkable for the average lower/middle class Senegalese to be eating lunch out. The wife/mother stayed home and no matter how busy she was or how many staffers the household had, she would lovingly prepared all the meals. The man and the kids would come home from work/school to eat, every day. Even if you could not be home at lunchtime, you would wait and eat later at home. No question of grabbing a quick bite no matter where.
In Senegal you will not find the typical European/US “quick lunch” kind of spot; no adult would ever imagine eating a sandwich for lunch, the average Senegalese wants to eat rice and not even the revolution that’s happening in the economy and in the family organization has made them change their habit. So far.
Until the early ’90 in residential neighborhoods, where the lower and middle class used to live, the only alternative to eating at home was the tangana (wolof for “it’s hot”, that is a place where you can eat/drink something hot, like milk or coffee or even better kinkeliba* and bread with butter). It was what in the US you would call a “hole in the wall”, where the young crowd would hang out late at night. They were mainly run by immigrants from Mali or Guinea, and no grown up would have ever stepped in there.
In the working-class neighborhoods, eating out was more of a reality (often the mother had to go to work herself, had no time to stay home and cook and they definitely could not afford a cook). So in the neighborhoods where they used to hang out for work, a new phenomenon flourished: the fast food ante litteram: the gargottes. Still to today gargottes are set up wherever there is a crowd (taxi stations, construction sites and pretty much everywhere a group of people may hang out for a little while, before going on with their life).
Despite all the resistance, the way people have their meals is changing this country, at least in the capital. Having lunch out is more and more commonplace: most women are not housewives anymore (and the women from the lower class are the ones running the gargottes, for that matter); kids are in school until later in the afternoon and eat western fast-food. Power-lunches, where people talk business over fancy food, are also becoming more of a thing; high-end international restaurants have been steadily growing in number over my nine years in Senegal, they mostly cater to young-ish Africa business men, while women prefer low-key places, with vegetarian options (unfathomable less than ten years ago).
There is something for everybody today, but the nostalgic middle-class fifty-something, longing for their wife’s culinary attention, disgusted by the makeshift restaurants and in general by a lunch out, resist standing tall and hungry against any alternative to rice. God bless their heart.
*kinkeliba is a caffeine-free hot beverage made by brewing the leaves of the kinkeliba bush.