Award-winning Senegalese restaurant in limbo after closure of Africa Centre
Little Baobab in Southwark had run a free catering school to help young people into the industry and now faces ‘start from zero again’
An award-winning Senegalese restaurant that ran a free catering school for young people is facing thousands of pounds in losses and uncertainty over its future following the sudden closure of its London base, the Africa Centre.
It has meant the suspension of Little Baobab’s chef-training programme, whose work was covered by Hyphen earlier in 2026. Food and equipment stored in the Africa Centre’s basement that were used for the school — which combined online and in-person sessions with practical kitchen training — are also understood to have been damaged following flooding after the building was shut.
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“Right now I’m just in the dark,” said Khadim Mané, Little Baobab’s founder and owner. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
The loss of the space in Southwark, south London, has been particularly difficult for Mané because the business had spent years moving between temporary venues before finally securing a permanent home there.
“I came to the centre, I bought new stuff, I created something really strong,” he said. “It’s like our little baby. You don’t want to leave your baby like that.”
Little Baobab won an African food award at the 2025 Be Inclusive Hospitality Spotlight Awards and was recently ranked second in Time Out’s guide to London’s best Nigerian and west African restaurants.
It is now more than two months since a member of the team arrived at the building in early July only to be told the restaurant could not open because of an issue with the site. “I did not have any notice, so we didn’t know what’s happening,” said Mané.
The Africa Centre, a charity and social space for African communities, opened in Covent Garden in 1964, becoming a hub for activists, writers and artists and a “home away from home” for the growing diaspora. It moved to the Southwark site in 2022.
Little Baobab, a Muslim-owned restaurant serving Senegalese food, took over the centre’s ground floor restaurant in September 2024 after a decade spent running pop-ups, catering and festival trading. The permanent site offered lunch and dinner alongside regular live music events.
Mané said business had been booming before the restaurant was forced to stop trading, with Little Baobab serving around 500 to 600 customers a week alongside catering bookings.
At first, the team hoped the disruption would last for only a week or two and continued telling customers they expected to reopen. But as the closure continued, Mané said the restaurant eventually had to cancel its bookings.
“We didn’t know when things would go back to normal so we were saying to people: oh, it’s fine, we’ll be back in one week, two weeks, three weeks, then a month,” he said.
The business has continued to face costs including supplier bills. Mané said the closure had also broken up Little Baobab’s team of between 11 and 15 staff because he could no longer guarantee them regular work.
“People need to survive — it’s sad to let them go,” he said. “The staff is not just staff, it’s a family.”
For the pop-ups and temporary residencies Little Baobab is still running, Mané said he now contacts members of his former team to see who is available but is no longer able to bring the full group together — although he hopes they will reunite if the restaurant finds another permanent home.
Among the items Mané says were damaged in flooding after Little Baobab lost access to the building were takeaway packaging and equipment used for the chef training programme designed to help people aged 18 to 30 into the hospitality industry, along with hobs, chopping boards, knives and uniforms.
Mané said he had not yet been able to establish the full financial impact of the closure more generally but estimated the losses from damaged items alone were already “a couple of grand”.
The Africa Centre formally announced that its main building would temporarily close from 28 July, saying at the time that it was due to “circumstances beyond our control”.
The centre has since said it has been operating with a long-term structural deficit and has struggled to meet its immediate financial obligations. It says maintaining the Southwark building has become financially unsustainable amid rising operating costs, reduced grant funding and inflation, and it is now considering selling up.
It has launched a GoFundMe with a £100,000 target to help reopen its doors and sustain its operations. The fundraiser has raised just over £10,000 so far. The centre says donations will also help it continue its education, wellbeing and cultural programmes and support young people, artists, entrepreneurs and local communities.
Little Baobab has meanwhile been forced to return to some of the temporary ways of trading it had relied on before securing its permanent space, including kitchen takeovers and monthly Teranga nights in Lower Clapton.
Mané said he would need funding to replace lost equipment and “start from zero again” with the chef training school. He plans to launch a fundraiser of his own as he explores the possibility of securing another permanent space.
He stressed that he hopes he and the Africa Centre can work together to move forward.
The Africa Centre has been approached for comment.
