This story aired in the March 4, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
Gumbo was born in Louisiana. The rich stew is iconic, while also being deeply personal to each chef. And love of Gumbo is found everywhere. In San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, Chef Dontaye Ball is serving bowls of it to bring folks together.
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REPORTER: On a Friday evening, inside the Gumbo Social kitchen in the heart of the Bayview, Chef Dontaye Ball is searing up some shrimp. The shrimp has been marinating for hours in traditional cajun seasoning.
Dontaye turns up the gas on the stove and squeezes oil onto a pan to heat up. After a minute goes by, he tosses in a handful of cajun shrimp. Once they’re cooked, they’ll be the final piece on Dontaye’s famous Gumbo.
The restaurant has five different types on the menu. But his most popular? The traditional Gumbo Ya-Ya.
BALL: I always tell people the recipe itself is just really a road map. It’s architectural plans. You still got to build it
REPORTER: There’s sausage, chicken and, of course, the holy trinity - a chopped up combination of onions, celery, and bell peppers. The special sauce is their roux, with a a 50 percent oil to butter ratio.
BALL: When that brown butter, when it melts and it browns and milk solids, toast up to me, it creates a very special flavor.
REPORTER: Gumbo’s rich history comes from all over the world - but was made famous in Louisiana, specifically Cajun country, a part of America that Dontaye’s family is familiar with. His folks from Oklahoma and Mississippi. In the ‘60s, they moved to SF.
REPORTER: And Dontaye grew up riding the 15 Muni bus, eating Blondie’s Pizza, and spending a lot of time in the Mission, Bayview ,and the Fillmore, where his grandma lived. He loved watching her cook and entertain the family and her neighbors.
BALL: I think it's just in the DNA. Um, you know, since I can remember, you know, all I wanted to do was, was cook.
REPORTER: His grandmother’s cooking, baking and open door hospitality sparked something in Dontaye at a very young age.
BALL: My grandmother was a superstar. You know, people loved her for the cuisine. They loved her for who she is as a human, but the cuisine, the gumbo, the, everything that you know, my grandma is able to bring people together through that, through that pot of gumbo.
REPORTER: So, when Dontaye eventually started his own cooking career, he wanted to bring her sense of community to the table.
REPORTER:Dontaye got his start in a retirement home. His first lesson in the kitchen was learning how to work with guest expectations. Then, - he got a job in the kitchen at Delfina - a well-known restaurant in the Mission.
REPORTER: There, Dontaye saw that making neighbors feel welcomed day in and day out was what kept diners coming back, a call back to how his grandmother made others feel when she cooked.
BALL: It always focused on the neighborhood and the neighborhood diners and never focused on people outside of the neighborhood.
REPORTER: Dontaye is the kind of guy who will tell you that he never wanted to open a restaurant. His gumbo was a popular Christmas dish he’d make for his friends and family, and when Covid hit he made it his side hustle. A few years ago, he decided to start a pop up at the Outer Sunset Farmers Market.
BALL: And so that was really a lifeline, not only for us, but for the sunset community. That Sunday was a nice community building piece. A lot of neighbors, a lot of families, a lot of families moving there. We're close to the water. It's always cold. Gumbo’s a great thing for that, right? You know, warms you up.
REPORTER: Talking about farmer’s markets make Dontaye’s face light up. His gumbo is full of the produce from the stands. He’s proud to buy his okra from a Hmong family that has a booth here.
BALL: You know, they, they really, you know, they really do steward the land and take care, take care of land, take care of people, uh, through the food that they grow.
REPORTER: His tent was popular with the farmers market crowd. And after the pandemic, Dontaye felt that Gumbo Social needed a place to grow, so he opened up the restaurant in 2023.
REPORTER: In addition to the Gumbo, he serves southern staples like po boys, red beans and rice, and corn hoecakes.
REPORTER: Bringing gumbo to San Franciscans and the Bayview is one thing, But Dontaye has a new goal. He wants to make gumbo America’s national dish - replacing the (unofficial) hamburger.
BALL: [Gumbo is] a dish that is created out of hardship, but it's elevated in a way that, that highlights African culture, uh, uh, Caribbean, French, uh, Creole Cajun, Like there's so much happening in the formation of the dish, the okra coming from Africa, like all of those pieces are meaningful to the fabric of our country.
REPORTER: He spearheaded national gumbo week last fall, and recently, Gumbo Social held a cooking contest for home cooks.
REPORTER: Eventually, Dontaye hopes that the country and his allies in the south will take notice.
BALL: And I've never seen a fight over a bowl of gumbo except who's going to get their last crab leg. You can't, you can't share a hamburger the way you would share a bowl of gumbo. You can't experience the burger the same way you experience the gumbo.
