You don’t have to be from West Africa for dishes at Little Liberia on East Warren to taste like home.
You know the feeling: A plate is placed before you, a bowl of rice slick in a thin layer of oil, vegetables charmingly overcooked, and despite its distance from anything that sits on your dining room table, there’s a familiar comfort in the imperfections of the dish — an allure even.
This is the overall experience at Little Liberia. There’s little white space on your plate, which is thronged with stews and gravies, fried plantains, a vegetable medley and a mound of rice. Each element is huddled onto the other like a cold crowd looking to generate body heat.
In March, the restaurant opened at the ground level of The Ribbon, the mixed-use apartment
complex at the corner of Kensington and East Warren that drew intrigue to Detroit’s East English Village neighborhood, its cinderblock stacks climbing the sky over the course of a year.
The restaurant is the brainchild of the chef Ameneh Marhaba, a native of Liberia who immigrated to Detroit at age 16. It was exactly a decade ago when Marhaba introduced Detroiters to the food of her upbringing. She started Little Liberia as a pop-up in 2016, extoling the beauty of Liberia’s fertile land with vegetables like cassava and jute leaves and potato greens cooked long and slow in aromatic spices to the point of viscosity. A throughline was the byproduct of the African oil palm tree. Rich palm butter and the intoxicating perfume of red palm oil brought life to stews, braises and sauces. She served jollof rice the Liberian way, made with sweet kernels of corn, carrots and green peas to round out the acidic notes of tomato.
Little Liberia takes the show that Marhaba once led on the road and gives it a stationary place to grow roots. The chef earned the $100,000 grand prize in the 2022 Comerica Hatch Detroit Contest, and in 2024, received an $80,000 grant through Motor City Match to help acquire a permanent space. The community, it would seem, wanted desperately to help Little Liberia find its home.
Today, the new space demonstrates the ways a brick-and-mortar restaurant allows the chef to tell a full story, where the food transitions from sole character to the main character of a much larger narrative.
Here, the dining room is decorated with African art, portraits by diverse local artists and jars of the same seasoning and sauces that flavor goat shanks and creamy split peas. In the early fall, an exhibit titled "Legacy an Lineage" was on display, designed to honor Black culture. Bohemian wooden light fixtures hang overhead and burnt orange glazed Arabic-style mosaic tiles are a backdrop for the bar, meant to emulate the feel of the sun rising and setting on a Liberian horizon — all artwork and seasoning blends available for purchase. The idea is for home cooks to take a stab at recreating the dishes at home.
Marhaba’s Little Liberia is pointedly Liberian without conceding to palates new to these flavors. There are chicken wings, but massaged in a pungent garlicky rub or slathered in a sweet peanut sauce, these are not your Lions tailgate wings. Every facet of the roasted wing is coated in flavor, and still, a cup of dipping sauce is served alongside them.
Bubbly servers are supportive ushers through the menu, offering comparable references for unfamiliar dishes. Pepper kala is something like a crispy fried doughnut hole, only the dough is just mildly sweet and four of the chewy puffs are served with a peppery hot sauce. Collard greens are not exactly as you know them. These are just as much a meat dish as they are greens, slow-cooked with beef until both are fork-tender.
Kidney beans are made into a glorious burgundy stew of acid and smoke ladled over a quarter-chicken, its skin caramelized in some spots, charred in others. Groundnut stew, one of Little Liberia’s most interesting dishes, is a puddle invigorated with the woodiness of the peanut and the mesmerizing depth of baking spices and hunks of beef.
There are intermissions from Little Liberia’s burly flavors. Mild quinoa flecked with cucumbers, tomatoes and herbaceous cilantro is a cold, refreshing salad between bites of spice and earth. A cucumber salad delivers a satisfying element of crunch to a sensory experience that hovers in a textural world of soft and slick, tender and smooth.
There are moments of heartbreak. An early visit on the opening menu served a glorious Liberian check rice, a fragrant long-grain white rice the flavor of popcorn, infused with greens the flavor of the earth. Simple, yet distinct, the rice was awe-striking, but gone in a flash, it vanished like Cinderella after midnight.
Despite all of its wonders, Little Liberia has the gift and the curse of home-cooking. For every moment of joy in comforting dishes, there's the disappointment of inconsistency. On one visit, the pepper kala might arrive piping hot and perfectly airy on the inside, on another, it might have the tough resilience of stale bread.
Everyone has their preference when it comes to plantains, be they so ripe they turn to sweet, dark, slippery fruit that melts in your mouth, starchy, creamy golden bananas with a hint of tart at the center — or a version that sits between the two. At Little Liberia, you might experience all three variations. One visit, there was a bitter note in both the plantains, and the pepper kala that hinted at oil that may have needed changing. At home, we turn a blind eye to these inconsistencies. At a highly anticipated restaurant, they're more difficult to ignore.
Dessert, too, brings a tinge of disappointment. The Chocolate Kiss and Pistachio Delight, each described as a mousse, are rather puddings, the pistachio laced with unpleasant, gelatinous pieces of pistachio paste.
On my initial visits, the true star, a little loaf of sticky rice bread, was not available. On the lucky evening it was, my skepticism at the potential of another dessert misstep turned to pure elation. I shimmied with my first bite of the chewy creation. It’s like mochi and banana bread and rice pudding at once.
This is where Little Liberia excels. In the dishes that are entirely, unabashedly Liberian and singular in Detroit’s dining scene.
Little Liberia, 16530 E. Warren Ave. Unit A, Detroit. 313-348-1561; littleliberia.com
While Detroit Free Press restaurant critics are no longer anonymous at area restaurants, they do their best to avoid being pandered to by restaurant staff. They show up to most restaurants unannounced at least three times, and do not accept complimentary meals. The Free Press covers all meals reviewed by critics. Our journalists adhere to the USA TODAY NETWORK Principles of Ethical Conduct For Newsrooms. Contact Detroit Free Press Dining and Restaurant Critic Lyndsay C. Green at: LCGreen@freepress.com. Follow @LadyLuff on Instagram and Twitter. Subscribe to the Eat Drink Freep newsletter for extras and insider scoops on Detroit-area dining.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: An East English Village restaurant brings West African flavors
