A Newfound Home

Ten years after Queen Sugar brought him to New Orleans, Kofi Siriboe reflects on his love for the city and offers a peek at his new creative haven for local artists

- Brande Victorian

If you had 24 hours to explore New Orleans with Kofi Siriboe, here’s where he'd take you. “I would start Uptown, take you to St. Charles, get some food at Lebanon’s Cafe—just because that’s out the way,” he says of the Middle Eastern restaurant. “Uptown, it’s Audubon Park, the oak trees, the moss. It’s just gorgeous.”

Next, you'd make your way down Magazine Street to peruse the vintage shops in the city’s commercial center, where storefronts match the creole cottage, shotgun and bungalow-style architecture of New Orleans houses. “Then we would have to stop at the Loews on Poydras, because that’s my old stomping ground,” says Siriboe of the hotel where he lived when he first came to the Crescent City from his native Los Angeles. New Orleans has been his “second home” for a decade. He arrived in 2015 to shoot Queen Sugar, Ava DuVernay’s OWN drama—on which he starred for seven seasons as Ralph Angel, the baby of the rural Louisiana Bordelon family. From his very first day there, he’s been enamored with the city.

The French Quarter is next on his list—but where to go afterward is a bit of a conundrum for Siriboe. “This is where I get stuck,” he admits, “because now it’s either hit that left on Esplanade, go down Treme and hit City Park, or go to TOLA.

“I would probably go down Treme,” he says after a moment of contemplation. “Chill, see all of that, then make our way back to Marigny, the Bywater area—and then we're posted up at TOLA.”

TOLA is an acronym for The Other LA, in reference to Louisiana—the first one being the California city where Siriboe, 31, grew up in the predominantly Black, upper-middle-class neighborhood of Ladera Heights. TOLA is an artist residency in the Marigny/Bywater area that Siriboe officially launched in February. It’s a space for artists across disciplines to work on their respective crafts. There’s even a recording studio to welcome musicians—a part of the property when the star purchased it.