Rockaway Beach is New York City’s Story of Love and Faith.

Babajide Alao didn’t start having doubts about his dream of opening a food cart serving West African food in his beloved Rockaway Beach community until he found himself thousands of miles away from home – with the aforementioned cart in his possession – but no easy way to get it back to New York.

“I flew to Oregon [to buy it], but driving back was not my intention. I was going to package it and have it shipped. But once I got to the shipping company, they said, ‘Your cart is fragile.’ And no one wanted to take that liability or that risk because of how delicate the cart is,”Alao, 26, spoke to Inside Edition Digital. He knew that the cart was fragile, but it was the only one he’d found that was aligned with his vision for the project, which is why he traveled all the way to Oregon to purchase it.

But he wasn’t prepared for the suggestion the person who sold him the cart gave him to get it to New York: “[He] was like ‘Get a U-Haul truck and drive it back.’”

Alao was nervous but decided to do it. Not only would he be responsible for getting a large, delicate item across the country, he had to make the close to 3,000-mile, four-day journey alone, something his girlfriend and business partner, Pesy Sikyala, 25, didn’t feel good about.

“When he called me to tell me the story, I freaked out a little bit…it was in the middle of your finals,” Sikyala said. “He’s pulling over to do exams, to submit his homework while driving, and I’m at home, and I can’t sleep because he’s in the middle of the country driving. So it was a test of our faith. Those four days were definitely a test of our faith, of how badly do we want this dream, this goal, that we are accomplishing?”

They persevered, even though they were sometimes overwhelmed. “Everything is a trial,”Alao admitted. “[But] I believe when you go through that trial, then it tells you if you’re really determined to do what you want to do, or what you had in your mind to do. I thought, ‘Should I take the food cart back? Take it back, take it back.’”

Sikyala and he both made it back to New York safely with the cart. But they had to endure more obstacles to get their business. The CradleIt started as a mobile food truck and then became a brick-and mortar restaurant. Then it was transformed into an urban farm. Being first time business owners, they have had to learn regulations and file permits that were unfamiliar and costly – a process made infinitely more difficult by pandemic-related closures.

“We do not have thousands of thousands of dollars sitting in our bank account,” Sikyala asserted. “We had to work with what we had at that moment and just our knowledge. So we decided to work on the restaurant ourselves. We were here night and day cleaning, tearing things apart, painting, removing things. It was like, ‘What do we want at the restaurant? What is this? We can’t call someone to come paint it. Let’s go to Home Depot, let’s get paint. Let’s start painting it ourselves.’”Sikyala acknowledged that they could not have done this alone and added that they have relied upon their friends and neighbors throughout the process. This circle has only grown in size since The Cradle was launched.

“We have a friend who’s a painter and she really put her time in to help us paint the restaurant and get it ready,”Sikyala was enthusiastic, noting that The Cradle was funded largely by donations from friends in restaurant industry. The space was immediately made more community-friendly after it opened. “We’re here to listen…we’ll just have open conversations, which leads to friendships. Next thing you know, [it’s] like, ‘Oh our buddy’s driving by. Oh, Hey, what’s up?’”Then, those new friends invite their friends. The couple believes that this is how customer loyalty is formed and maintained.

“No matter how great or bad your product is, people will always, always remember you as a person before they remember your product. I think that’s very important for us, for people to know who we are as individuals, our background. We talk about the stuff we do outside of our restaurant, outside of our food,” Sikyala said.

Fashion modeling is one of Alao’s other jobs. This is how Sikyala and Alao met at New York Fashion Week 2014. Both are still active in the industry. Sikyala has been signed to Wilhelmina Models, while Alao is with System Agency. And soon, they’ll have their hands even more full: they are expecting their first baby in just a few weeks.

Getting to know Alao and Sikyala has certainly been vital to keeping customers engaged and wanting to return to The Cradle, but to be clear: it’s the food that draws people to the restaurant. Offering a first-of-its-kind experience on the Rockaway Beach peninsula has been the crux of enticing customers, who have turned out in volume over the past three summers to try the couple’s interpretation of West African food. Many of their customers are fellow expats from the region – Alao is from Lagos, Nigeria and Sikyala is from Kinshasa, Congo – and for them, the menu is familiar and comforting.

“This place hits home in the stomach,”Outside the restaurant, one customer could be heard saying “Hi” to another. “I’m telling you!”

The Cradle has always been grateful for the enthusiasm of its customers, but it’s also difficult to understand their tastes, which is why it’s been such a challenging task. “It’s not easy to get customers to try something they’ve never tried before, something new. And when it comes to West African food or African food in general, there’s a lot of stereotypes behind it…is it too spicy? Is it too oily? That was my frustration,” Sikyala admitted. They asked each other, “How can we present this to get people to try or at least look and see, what’s that over there? What’s going on? How should our [countries] be represented through our food?”

Egusi soup is a Nigerian dish that includes bitter leaf and ground African melons seeds. They also offer West African dishes such as joloff rice bowls. These dishes are made with a vegan base, farm fresh produce and use a variety of ingredients to appeal to as many diets and palates as possible. Sikyala brings her Congolese influence in through The Cradle’s puff puffs – a sweet fried dough snack reminiscent of beignets – which are called mikate in the Congo. Sikyala has always considered mikate a way to connect with people.

“My grandma made [them] almost every single day,”She remembered. She also remembered that her family had moved from Kinshasa to New York when they first arrived. It seemed only natural that she would continue this tradition. “When we first moved in, we were having guests over to get to know the neighborhood and we wanted something [to serve]. So, I asked my mom, ‘Why don’t we just make mikate?’ So many memories came back from making it with my grandma that ever since then I went back to my roots and started making it every single week.”

It’s been that desire to make the foods that remind them of home in the ways that feel most authentic to their own experiences that has inspired Alao and Sikyala to push themselves more, and ultimately further away from the glamorous world that brought them together. Two summers ago, Alao and Sikyala were granted the rights to their own piece of land. Edgemere FarmThree miles from the restaurant is the Urban Farm. Edgemere lives on a 1/2-acre abandoned city-owned lot on the Rockaway peninsula, a New York City neighborhood that was ravaged during 2012’s Hurricane Sandy and is home to a federally-mandated food desert.

The farm has given Alao and Sikyala an opportunity to provide their restaurant with farm-to-table produce – making The Cradle the only such African restaurant in New York City – which has long been vital to their long-term vision. “The main goal of the restaurant is to be 100% farm-to-table. We are working on that every single day and also learning from every process because life is a learning process and is a learning curve at every turn,” Alao said. “Knowing where my food comes from is really important [to me]. Similar to living back at home in Nigeria, we had a small garden in the backyard. It was so normal until I came to the United States and started living in the apartment building and not having access to farms or being able to grow our own food. Farm-to-table really brings me closer to home and closer to how my grandparents did it in Nigeria.”

The implications of the wider community’s lack of access to fresh food isn’t lost on Sikyala, who is using the farm as a point of education, too. “Driving [through a] Black community there’s a high chance you’ll run into a lot of fast food establishments,”She pointed out. “Most of [them] have never been to a farm before or know where their foods are coming from.”

With that ethos driving her, Sikyala created The Cradle’s Farming 101 program, which is designed to give local children and their families hands-on opportunities to learn the ins and outs of growing, harvesting and composting. “In Africa, we grew up growing our own fruits and vegetables,”She elaborated. “That alone is just an important aspect of the value of life.”

Their sense of responsibility for the community drives them and moves them to action.

“The Cradle, it was something of a spiritual calling. It’s when you feel like you’re destined to do something more than what you’re currently doing,” Alao reflected. Alao believes that the future is bright and he can see the limit. “Every single day, I’m inspired. I’m like, ‘Wow. This would be great with this. This would be great with that.’”

And while he acknowledges that they aren’t quite ready to bring every one of those visions to life right away, he trusts in the power of faith to get them there. “We walk by faith and not by sight. Because being able to see something does not really mean that’s the end goal,”He said. “When you walk by faith, it’s like, you don’t see it but you believe. [But] once that belief is there, then it becomes something tangible.”

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