Kitchen 66 launched in 2016 as the brainchild of the Lobeck Taylor Family Foundation. It’s a multi-week program designed to help food entrepreneurs turn their ideas into fully fleshed-out businesses.
In its first decade, dozens of chefs, restaurateurs and entrepreneurs from across the world have graduated from different cohorts — and planted roots in Tulsa’s expanding food scene.
Afrikan Delights
Fifame Alahassa was hungry for something more.
Alahassa immigrated to Oklahoma from Benin 20 years ago, following in her parent’s footsteps by pursuing a career in medicine. But cooking was her real passion.
In 2024, she entered the Kitchen 66 Launch Program, where she was granted access to a commercial kitchen to test out food concepts and market herself.
It wasn’t long before she and her husband Yannick became the official owners of Afrikan Delights, a west African restaurant now housed in Mother Road Market on Route 66.
“Before you start your business, you have to gain some knowledge,” Alahassa told The Eagle. “Just because you have the talent is not enough … Just because you can cook doesn’t mean you can run a business.”
She specializes in authentic west African cuisine with a little “European influence.” This includes foods like jollof rice, rice with tomato stew, fufu with egusi, puff puff and fish.
Since entering the food business, she has found a sense of fulfillment that she didn’t have in her previous job. Before Afrikan Delights, she would constantly check the time during work, wondering when she could clock out and go home.
“I was not happy,” she said, “but when I’m here, I’m not looking at the time. I’m happy doing it. I work 12 hours every day, and I’m happy doing it.”
Alahassa and her husband will celebrate one year as owners of Afrikan Delights in July. Their goal, she said, is to become the first African food chain in Oklahoma.
Peggy Flavors
Peggy Diaz de Marcano moved her family to Tulsa from Venezuela in 2017, a moment she described as incredibly jarring.
Her idea for creating her food truck, Peggy Flavors, came that same year when she began selling food to her co-workers at a hotel.
“What better way to be able to bring a piece of (myself) and show Tulsans Venezuelan (culture) through (my) eyes, how (I) know it,” Marcano said in Spanish via translator.
Common Venezuelan foods include arepas, empanadas and cachapas.
In 2021, she joined Kitchen 66’s El Programa de Lanzamiento, which specifically helps Spanish-speaking food entrepreneurs get their businesses off the ground.
During the program, Marcano held multiple pop-ups at Mother Road Market with its takeover cafe, which features a rotating cast of restaurant concepts. In 2023, she opened her first food truck in Broken Arrow.
Since then, Marcano said she’s come to realize that it takes a village of support to be a successful business owner, crediting Kitchen 66, the nonprofit UMA Center and the Tulsa Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
Marcano told The Eagle she has already opened another food truck on Cherry Street. Her goal is to eventually open a brick-and-mortar location.
Cherry Street Kitchen
Jen Lindsay has been in the restaurant business for 40 years. She started as a waitress, opened her own cafe, did some catering and even worked as a personal chef. All of that culminated in her owning Cherry Street Kitchen.
Lindsay was a part of Kitchen 66’s second cohort program in 2016, where she learned how to pitch and market a business. She entered with the intention of continuing as a personal chef but, in 2017, one of her clients proposed the idea of partnering to make their own restaurant.
She opened her restaurant on Cherry Street that same year and, in 2020, moved the business downtown to Fifth and Boulder.
Lindsay makes it a point to work directly with her team in the restaurant. She spends about 90% of her time in the kitchen.
“I feel like I have to, because if I wasn’t here, then I don’t know what I’d be doing,” she said. “I make it to where I have to be here.”
Popular menu items include her signature chicken pot pie, hot melt panini sandwiches and several cold sandwich options.
Ismael Lele is a Report for America corps member and writes about business in Tulsa for The Oklahoma Eagle. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting this link.
