Yum Village has extended its takeover of El Club’s kitchen in Southwest Detroit

Chef Godwin Ihentuge is enjoying his time at El Club. At his flagship Yum Village restaurants in the New Center and West Village neighborhoods, he has to serve what’s on the menu — and that means lots of rice bowls. At El Club he can fool around. Sometimes the dishes sound like manic mash-ups: Afro Shawarma with yam hummus, Afro Jerk Chicken, BBQ Jerk Burger, Suya Dip Chicken Burger — and now he’s added pizza to the list. It’s bar food meets Caribbean-Nigerian. Kind of.

The collaboration with the Southwest Detroit music venue began in April, and the partnership has apparently gone so well that it was recently extended beyond its initial six-month agreement. Food is served on El Club’s large and lovely mural-decorated patio, or inside near the bar, when patrons’ ears can bear it. When I went, everyone clustered at the picnic tables on the concrete, avoiding the Astroturf. For now, food is served only on show nights.

Usually I take pains to maintain anonymity when I review, using a fake name for the reservation, paying with someone else’s credit card. This time, for reasons I won’t bore you with, I had to set my visit up with Ihentuge beforehand, and found the unfamiliar attention… not bad at all. I could get used to being greeted sweetly by the bouncer and served a little something of everything by a loquacious chef like Alex Wardwell.

But I paid for the food and drinks, and am confident it was the same stuff everyone else was getting, if perhaps in greater quantities. Thank god I brought a hungry neighbor.

We started with a vegetarian flatbread, a sturdy naan topped with lurid purple cabbage and pickled green peppers, spicy enough to be interesting but not mouth-numbing. Next was mango curry stew atop very fresh tortilla chips, not very mango-y, if truth be told; the orange color came from a cheese sauce, not the fruit. See how Wardwell and Ihentuge are throwing everything at the diner but the kitchen sink?

Wardwell touts his yam fries as healthier than potatoes, and they’re also delicious, just slightly sweet. He also boasts of a no-salt policy — every dish is carried by the flavors of the ingredients and spices alone. They’re all halal, too.

Those flavors would include five different sauces for the smoked wings, all of them complex and good: a jerk reminiscent of vanilla; a strong garlic Parmesan; a sweet garlic barbecue; a mango curry redolent of cumin; and a very assertive peach honey mustard, best enjoyed in small quantities.

Another way to eat wings is with suya sauce. This originates with a Nigerian ground-peanuts-peppers-and-spices snack called kuli-kuli, but now you can buy it in powdered form. Ihentuge makes a barbecue sauce by combining an Asian-style sauce (“hoisin, soy, teriyaki”) with mango, garlic, and suya powder. The yellow suya is also sprinkled on the chicken during and after it’s barbecued.

I’m not usually a fan of nachos, which feel so un-Mexican, though they were invented there. But Wardwell and Ihentuge are no respecters of boundaries, to diners’ benefit. Jerk chicken nachos incorporate not only Asiago and Parmesan cheeses but peach puree, pickled cabbage, and pickled peppers. For the jerk, chicken is smoked on a wood fire every day at the Yum Village headquarters, using a marinade that includes Cameroonian peppers, and then finished on the grill. “The most creative nachos I’ve seen,” said my companion.

Pizza, a recent addition, is baked in the hybrid wood-fired and gas Italian oven left over from when Chef Pepe Z (Matt Ziolkowski) used to run El Club’s kitchen starting in 2016. Ihentuge is drawing on his own earlier stint at Sgt. Pepperoni’s to train up new pizzaiolos. I found the jerk chicken pizza mellow and welcoming, with a thick bready crust. There’s also beef pepperoni, and all pizzas are sprinkled with a dry-aged mix of Asiago and Parmesan.

Other possible orders are jerk burgers or lemon pepper jerk chicken burgers on pretzel buns.

El Club’s bar manager ShyAnn Clark says the bartenders freestyle the cocktails, always changing what’s available. They’ll ask what the visiting musician likes to drink, and “if the artist likes it, their fans will like it as well.” I had a delicious Spicy Mule on a hot night, refreshing with cucumber, just spicy enough from jalapeño. Beers change seasonally as well; expect coffee and pumpkin spice this fall.

Ihentuge would like to expand to serving at El Club on non-show nights. For now you can carry out on show nights even if you’re not going for the music, by ordering at yumvillagemarketpantry.com.

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This article appears in Sep 6-12, 2023.