Explore history and culture though food! Part culinary adventure, part cultural lecture, Dining with Friends celebrates the diverse flavours of the world through shared meals at restaurants in our community.
Dining with artists | an evening with poet, playwright and performer, Titilope Sonuga
Thursday, June 19, 2025
6 to 9 p.m.
Sauce Modern Caribbean Restaurant (13655 St Albert Trail NW, Edmonton, AB)
The Friends of Royal Alberta Museum Society (FRAMS) invites you to join us for an evening of celebration and conversation centered around Juneteenth. We’re excited to once again partner with Feed the Soul YEG to bring you another Dining with Artists event featuring poet, playwright and performer, Titilope Sonuga.
Titilope’s work is a testament to the transformative impact of storytelling and Black joy. Her work embodies a sense of rootedness and unflinching womanhood that resonates beyond the stage or pen. To learn more about Titilope’s work, visit her website Titilope.ca.
We will be enjoying the rich flavours of a Juneteenth-inspired BBQ menu by the team at Sauce Modern Caribbean Restaurant while exploring the history of Black settlement in Alberta through artistic expression and open conversation.
Menu:
- First course: watermelon salad
- Second course: beef brisket or beyond meat meatballs (vegetarian), stewed red beans and black eyed peas, corn coins, mixed sweet potato salad and hush puppies with a spicy honey
- Third course: peach cobbler
About the artist
Titilope Sonuga is a globally renowned poet, playwright and performer. She renders, both in verse and performance, a quality of rootedness and unflinching womanhood that extends beyond the bounds of a single poem or poetic performance.
Her genre-defying work has propelled her to a vibrant life in the arts. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Down to Earth (2011), Abscess (2014), and This Is How We Disappear (2019) and has composed two spoken word albums, Mother Tongue (2011) and Swim (2019).
She is a writer who blends a remarkable elegance of craft with an ever-present human quality that carries her words into expansive realms scripting campaigns for global brands, including The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, and the White Ribbon Alliance. She served a two-year term as an ambassador for Intel Corporation’s She Will Connect campaign, a program dedicated to empowering women and girls through technological literacy, commerce, and opportunity.
Titilope Sonuga has written three plays: The Six (an intergenerational exploration of womanhood), Naked (a one-woman play) and Ada the Country (a musical). She played a lead role as an actor in the hit Nigerian television series Gidi Up.
She was the first poet to perform at a Nigerian presidential inauguration in 2015 and was the ninth poet laureate of the City of Edmonton (2021 to 2023).
Dining with Artists is bringing a twist to Dining with Authors, which is a spin-off of FRAMS’ popular Dining with Friends events. First conceived in 2013 by Linda Tzang (former RAM cultural communities curator), the series has introduced diners to different cuisines at a variety of family-run restaurants across Edmonton. These new variations continue to combine food and cultural communities. We look forward to welcoming both new and familiar faces as we bond together over history, culture and great food.
About Dining With Friends
Dining with Friends was the brainchild of Linda Tzang, former RAM Curator of Cultural Communities. It was initially offered to complement the museum’s successful Chop Suey on the Prairies exhibition. Since then, diners have been exploring cuisines from around the world at our quarterly events.
Each event includes a set, multi-course menu, often featuring some of the restaurants most popular dishes. Accompanying the food is a short talk about the history of the dishes, and the people, places, and cultures where the food originates. Our previous events have included visits to Blue Willow, Tiffin, Dorinku, Langano Skies, 97 Hot Pot, El Rancho, and Cafe Beirut, to name a few.
We saw the information about the dinners and thought we’d give it a try. We’ve hardly missed one since then – and we became FRAMS members in the process!
Norm Kluthe, FRAMS Member
The program has been an outstanding success –providing entertaining and educational programming out in the community while also making many new friends for RAM and FRAMS. It’s quickly become a member favourite, with tickets often selling out before they are released to the general public.
