The Sweet Taste of Success

Fall 2025
By Alice Levitt

The warm aroma of deviled Scotch eggs — spiced ground turkey surrounding a yolk-y, creamy filling — wafts through the dining room as Opeyemi “Ope” Amosu ’14 serves a dozen guests what will become one of his specialty dishes. It’s October 2018, and the setting is an apartment complex in Uptown, one of the “Chopd + Stewd” pop-up dinners that would introduce Houstonians to Amosu’s vibrant new take on West African cuisine.

Six years later, Amosu’s Nigerian fusion concept has grown from a pop-up dinner series to a downtown Houston food hall to a buzzy café in Montrose thoughtfully infused with West African flavors, designs and storytelling. At its helm, Amosu has already been honored twice as a James Beard Award semifinalist, revered as the Oscar of the hospitality industry. Back in 2018, after each dinner, Amosu had diners fill out comment cards with their thoughts, conducting what can only be described as a culinary focus group. This is not how most restaurants are created. But most chefs don’t hold an MBA from Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

In fact, Amosu wasn’t even the one doing the cooking at first. Though he had experience as an ambitious home cook during his undergrad days barbecuing for his fraternity brothers at Missouri’s Truman State University, he didn’t yet think of himself as a chef. Early on, Amosu had no plans to open this kind of elevated, award-winning restaurant. When the idea for ChòpnBlọk first gelled for him in 2017, the inspiration was Italian fast-casual restaurant Piada. So it made sense when he started out by serving his flavorful creations at POST Market, known for its range of international food stalls. But there was one tiny problem with his concept.
 

“The guests didn’t want to get up,” Amosu jokes. Designed as a fast-casual space where diners would only spend 45 minutes, ChòpnBlọk instead became a culinary sensation. Diners planned date nights around their artfully presented bowls of rice, seasonal vegetables and liberally spiced halal proteins, and Amosu’s creations were spotlighted by The New Yorker, Essence and Southern Living and noted chef Marcus Samuelsson.

By 2024, the first standalone ChòpnBlọk restaurant debuted with similar fanfare. According to Amosu, the most popular dish is the Golden Bowl, which combines smoky jambalaya fused with West African jollof rice, chicken curry, vegetables and stewed plantains, while his go-to order is the Buka Bowl: meaty boneless short ribs with rice and beans and sweet plantains. Rice students have enjoyed both dishes — not to mention those surprisingly elegant deviled Scotch eggs — as ChòpnBlọk guests.

Amosu makes a point of hosting student events as part of his commitment to mentoring young Black men on campus. “I very rarely say ‘no’ when I get a call or a request from Rice or any other part of my network,” he says. He’s currently in the early phases of creating a philanthropic arm of ChòpnBlọk called the FELA Initiative (Finance & Entrepreneurship Literacy Academy), which he hopes will help to support Rice students, among many others.
 

Though he didn’t do much cooking while at Rice, Amosu says it was his role as “Chief Party Officer” for the Jones Student Association that may have best prepared him for his second career, which has brought him out of the boardroom and into the kitchen.

“I was the one who handled all the ordering for catering. That was my first time dealing with placing large orders of catering and so understanding how that works and how much we were spending on those types of things — it definitely came in handy,” he recalls.

Amosu envisions a future for ChòpnBlọk that goes well beyond Houston — and acknowledges that growth means focusing on operations, not orders. “It can’t depend on me making everyone’s Golden Bowl to be successful,” he says. All the better for food lovers around the country who would love to see a ChòpnBlọk on their block.