Will African cuisine be the next big flavor movement?

Americans, for the most part, aren't terribly hungry today for the foods and flavors of sub-Saharan Africa. Be patient. Josh Schonwald is convinced there will be an appetite for it — by 2035 at the very latest. Curious Chicagoans game to taste a trend a-borning can do so now at any of the growing number of African restaurants in the area.

Schonwald, an Evanston-based journalist, highlighted sub-Saharan cuisines, which aren't North African or even Ethiopian by his definition, as the ethnic food to watch for, eventually, in his book, "Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches From the Future of Food" (Harper, $25.99).

Why did he choose sub-Saharan Africa? Perhaps the stiff odds appealed to him. In the book, he asks Kara Nielsen, a food "trendologist" with CCD Innovation, a San Francisco-based product development company, if there's "any frontier, still unknown, that wasn't on its way."

"African," Nielsen replies. "It's not on the radar screen at all."

Schonwald started investigating — and eating. The book lists three factors for sub-Saharan Africa's success one day: 1. "A growing appetite for ethnic novelty." 2. "A shrinking world of exotic food to introduce." 3. "There is only one unexplored continent, and it isn't Antarctica." Add it all up and what do you get? "(The) Senegalese version of P.F. Chang's," Schonwald wrote.

Why eat sub-Saharan African food in Chicago? Well, as the Tribune reported in a Jan. 14 story titled "Africans seek 79th Street niche," the number of African immigrants in the Chicago area quadrupled from 1990 to 2010 to an estimated 42,400, according to U.S. census figures. That's the fifth-largest African population in the country, putting Chicago behind New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Minneapolis, the Tribune reported.

The African immigrant community is still relatively small, capable of supporting "only a handful of restaurants and a few grocery stores," Schonwald says in a recent email. "There's not a lot of places to get exposed to egusi or goat pepper soup in Chicago these days."

Still, the point is that if you want egusi, a thick stew made from ground squash seeds, you can get it here. The sub-Saharan African restaurants in Chicago are, for the most part, "still ethnic for ethnics," as Schonwald stressed in the book. Portions tend to be inexpensive and ample, but ambience and service are informal. Language barriers may make ordering a challenge. Many restaurants, as Schonwald discovered, double as informal community centers, so they can be busy, bustling places, especially if the television is on.

Schonwald is 41, white and never has been to Africa. Sub-Saharan African food was a new cuisine for him when he started his book. Not all of his dining encounters have gone smoothly. He doesn't particularly like palm oil, which is used in cooking such West African dishes as jollof rice. Schonwald confessed in his book that he and his wife had moments when they were, well, less than enthusiastic about one more dinner on a sub-Saharan theme.

"At one point, after a mediocre mafe, a peanut butter stew, it crossed my mind that the reason why there are not many sub-Saharan African restaurants around is that they're not very good," he groused in print. But then his wife asked an important question: "'Maybe there's an African Bayless?' The implication: Visiting every West African place in every mini-mall was not the best approach to seeing the African future."

Bayless, of course, refers to Rick Bayless, whose restaurants, cookbooks and television shows have opened a nation to the possibilities of Mexico's cuisines. Who could be the African Bayless? Schonwald speculated in the book that it might be celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson. After all, it took reading and cooking from the Ethiopian-born, Swedish-reared Samuelsson's book, "The Soul of a New Cuisine," to fully open Schonwald's eyes to the promise in sub-Saharan food. But Samuelsson, who opened and then departed from Chicago's just-closed C-House Restaurant, a seafood/steak joint with no African dishes, has many projects. Schonwald wondered if African food was to prove to be "merely a phase" for the New York City-based Samuelsson.

Like Schonwald, Nielsen believes African food needs an advocate, someone like Samuelsson, to help popularize the cuisines with the public.

CCD Innovation charts various foods — Nielsen eschews "ethnic" for words like "regional" or "global" — on a five-step Trend Map. Stage 1 is when a food ingredient, flavor or cuisine gets picked up by fine-dining restaurants and adventurous diners. An example of this might be a dish made from the mangalitsa, a rare breed of hairy Hungarian pig. Stage 5 is when that food becomes an everyday item found everywhere, from grocery shelves to fast-food menus. Think salsa, for instance.

Sub-Saharan food is pre-Stage 1, "barely on the radar" today, Nielsen says, but she thinks it is "moving ever so slightly" since her fateful conversation with Schonwald a few years ago. She shared a link to a story on the website of Food Management, a food service magazine, about African cuisine inspiring chefs and turning up on college campuses.

"I find campus food service pretty exciting and trend forward, about a low 2 on our 5-stage Trend Map," Nielsen wrote in an accompanying email.

Interviewed for the Food Management article was Wilbert Jones, a Chicago-based food product developer, marketing consultant and cookbook author. Spurred by what he saw as a lack of visibility for African cuisines in culinary schools, he offered a series of lectures on the cuisines of six African countries to students at Kendall College.

"When Africa is presented, it's usually Morocco, and South Africa for the wine. There are 55 countries in Africa, and 53 are just left off," said Jones, who is developing a television special, "A Taste of Africa: Culture and Cuisine from Casablanca to Cape Town."

Plate, an industry magazine targeted at chefs, also highlighted African cuisine in its November-December issue. Recipes from chefs in Africa and the United States were featured, include a dessert recipe from Almaz Yigizaw of Edgewater's Ethiopian Diamond.

All good attention, yes, but for sub-Saharan food to really become a trend it will have to prove compelling to a larger public. Will it?

That African cuisines are not on the foodie radar was also noted by Jessica Harris, the food historian and author, in her book, "High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey From Africa to America." Except for the foods of South Africa and the Mediterranean coast, she writes, "it would seem that we're content to remain in the dark about the tastes of the continent." Anyone who has tasted the cuisines of Africa knows how "shortsighted" that is, she notes, adding, "Much African food is tasty indeed."

Nielsen says African flavors will have to transport taste buds to new thrills and new experiences to be accepted. "It has to be flavorful and somewhat novel," she says. "There has to be a mystique, an aura or an aesthetic that people can buy into. Sub-Saharan Africa is still so unknown. It's hard for people to connect to it."

Harris sounds optimistic in her book. She writes that "tastes of the African motherland and its diaspora have … come full circle with Ghanaian groundnut stew and Caribbean peas and rice becoming new culinary classics." The U.S. is growing more culturally diverse, she adds, and that, along with the "omnivorous curiosity of all Americans, means that we're all tasting and sampling one another's foods daily."

Sub-Saharan African food is the future, Schonwald has little doubt. Why, then, bother with it now? Why not stick with tried-and-true Ethiopian. Or wait for that Senegalese P.F. Chang's to appear?

"This is an opportunity to try something before it's translated by the food industry," says Schonwald, as he waits for dinner at Qaato, a dimly lit, no-frills Nigerian restaurant in Rogers Park. "You have a different experience now. I find it exhilarating to go to a place like this. … It is so geared on focusing on the community, it's a cultural experience."