On Friday February 5, 2016, we opened the doors of Simi’s to customers. We named the restaurant after our first daughter, who spent a lot of time with me as I was tweaking recipes and learning about how to run the restaurant. In many ways, she was always my taster. Over the years, our restaurant served guests from different backgrounds and ethnicities. We hosted birthday, graduation, and engagement parties, wedding receptions, and even had live bands in our restaurant serenading customers and reminding us of how food unites us. As we grew to be a popular destination for Nigerian cuisine in Chicago, we learned a lot about running a business, and connecting with people and businesses that influenced us. September 2017, we welcomed our second daughter and because family remains at the center of our lives and business, we knew in no time we would be adding her name to the business. 

The Birth of Simi and Temi

As God will have, we catered an event on December 1, 2018 in Wausau, WI with another American cuisine caterer, and I left the event in awe of how easy and efficient their cooking processes were and I was inspired to identify gaps in our cooking processes at Simi’s that are creating inefficiencies. And so, during the long 4 hours turned 7 hours drive to Chicago, thanks to the snowy, icy expressways, it dawned on me that we spend a lot of time and effort in the preparatory stage, from cleaning, to cutting the vegetables prior to blending, and then boiling the blended vegetables prior to actual cooking. And that day, Simi and Temi was birth. Upon returning to Chicago, I hurried to the kitchen, aka my science lab, and began experimenting. Over the next few months, I cried, I lost hope, I gain confidence, and cried again and lost hope and gained confidence again to hone on the ingredients I was curating for cooking one of our popular stews, Ayamase. We began using it at the restaurant, and we instantly gained a lot of efficiencies and ease in the kitchen. The restaurant’s bank account also saw some gains since we were able to cook and cater more Ayamase stew compared to when we prepped all the ingredients from scratch.