Powamekka Café: The Restaurant Tupac Designed in a Notebook

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Tupac Shakur planned a restaurant the way he planned records — in a notebook, in detail. Across three handwritten pages, he sketched Powamekka Café: a "down home Southern" hideout where friends and family could gather and, in his spelling, "escape the worldz cold reality." He never lived to open it. Twenty years later, for one weekend in New York, it opened anyway.

The Notebook Version

The concept Tupac left behind was remarkably complete for a few pages of handwriting: the name, the mood ("a passionate paradise 4 people with power 2 play and parlay"), restrooms labeled "Divaz" and "Playaz," and a menu rooted in Southern and Creole cooking — the food of family gatherings, drawn from generations of recipes. This was not a celebrity licensing idea. It was a floor plan for the room he wanted to sit in.

Three Nights in New York

In April 2017, to mark Tupac's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, his estate teamed up with Sweet Chick, the Lower East Side restaurant co-owned by restaurateur John Seymore and Nas. From April 7 to 9, Sweet Chick became Powamekka Café. The walls filled with childhood photographs, framed pages from the notebooks, and memorabilia. The bathrooms got their Divaz and Playaz signs.

What Was on the Menu

The kitchen cooked the food Tupac actually loved: his cousin Jamala's fried chicken wings, meatloaf, gumbo, white mac and cheese, cheese fries, caramelized Brussels sprouts and red pepper-spiced biscuits. A year earlier, Fresno, California had hosted a one-day Powamekka for the 20th anniversary of his death, serving a California Love Chicken Sandwich and Hennessy Apple Butter wings. Two coasts, same idea: this was a menu of memory, not marketing.

The Point of the Place

Plenty of musicians have lent their names to restaurants. Almost none left the blueprint in their own hand. Powamekka matters because it shows the 25-year-old rapper thinking like a host: who the room is for, what it should feel like, and which dishes make people stay. For three nights in 2017, strangers ate dinner inside that thought.

FAQ

Was Powamekka Café a real restaurant?
It was a real pop-up, twice. A one-day version ran in Fresno in September 2016, and the full three-night version took over Sweet Chick in New York from April 7 to 9, 2017, built from Tupac's own notebook sketches by his estate. It was never a permanent restaurant.

What food did Tupac love most?
The pop-up menus were built around his documented favorites: fried chicken wings (his cousin Jamala's recipe), meatloaf, gumbo, and macaroni and cheese — classic Southern comfort food.

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