The second Festus Ezeli ducks through the door of 9JaGrills (opens in new tab), the Nigerian restaurant that opened in August in downtown Oakland, he’s recording. I watch as he films all 6-feet-11 of himself with an outstretched arm that’s longer than any selfie stick. 

Wearing his signature white T-shirt saying “Food is love” (which is for sale (opens in new tab), along with one that says “Fufu over feelings,” for $40), he hunches slightly in the low-ceilinged restaurant, bouncing to the Afrobeat in the background. His grin is wide. He’s dancing like a man entering a place that holds the promise of home: egusi soup, braised oxtail, jollof, and fried plantains — the dishes he grew up eating in Benin City, Nigeria. 

Ezeli is clearly comfortable with being on camera. He knows how to turn on the charm. By this point — as the host of Festus Feasts (opens in new tab) on Instagram, which has more than 100,000 followers — he has the drill down. Sometimes he has his videographer with him, but today he’s flying solo. He looks back over the footage. Oops. The camera was off. He dutifully goes back outside and films his grand entrance into the modest restaurant again. 

Ezeli has learned to do a lot of things over again. A decade ago, the former Warriors center and NBA champion could not get to the bathroom alone, much less get his groove on. A defect in his left knee, aggravated by years of basketball, meant his career came with an expiration date.

A botched knee surgery put him in a wheelchair for six months. Multiple surgeries trying to fix it followed. Then a blood clot almost killed him. He had to return to Sacramento, where his parents now live. His mother, who often stars in his videos, fed him the food he grew up with and helped him heal.

Ezeli had to retire from professional basketball in 2017. But the 36-year-old is still using his body. It’s just that now — liberated from the pressure to keep it under 5% body fat, as he did when he played for the Warriors — he’s using it to eat. 

Though he launched his Instagram account in September 2023 with a post about Roadhouse Deli in Elk Grove, Ezeli’s real culinary celebrity kicked off last March, when he went to San Tung, the Chinese-Korean institution in the Sunset. There he ordered the legendary sticky-crispy wings and proceeded to eat them with a fork.

“I didn’t think I was going to get triggered …” quipped a follower. “But that fork is making me feel things.” (Ezeli’s fussiness about his fingers has become a bit of a schtick: He keeps a box of blue latex gloves in his car and, in the face of a burger, will snap them on like a surgeon.) 

The San Tung video blew up, racking up more than a million views. A year later, celebrity arguably begat celebrity: Pharrell stopped at the restaurant for some wings and, shortly thereafter, so did Sam Smith. Ezeli returned with DJ Jazzy Jeff (opens in new tab).

Bonta Hill — who cohosts Warriors broadcasts with Ezeli — wasn’t surprised to see his colleague’s side project take off. San Tung was on a short list of restaurants Hill had recommended that Ezeli check out. Not to mention, well, Fezzy is Fezzy. “When he brought up wanting to do the videos, I was like, ‘Sure, Fezzy,’” Hill says. “Festus has a brilliant mind. He never sits still, and he’s always looking to do something.” 

Whether Ezeli considers himself a food influencer is up for debate. Though he does accept comped meals by restaurants excited for the attention, he also continues to pay out of pocket. He started visiting mom-and-pops as a way to support those struggling after the pandemic, so it’s a question he bristles lightly at. “I’m not an influencer, because I’m not doing it to be an influencer,” he says. “I’m just recording my regular life.”

He prefers to call whatever he’s doing a hobby — and himself a “foodie in training.” You could definitely slot him as a part of what The New York Times recently christened the “feel-good refresh (opens in new tab)” of food influencing: a wave of “regular guy” creators like Kent Burris, who posts under the handle DineWithKent (opens in new tab). Ezeli fits the positive, earnest vibe; it’s just that — unlike Burris, who’s a middle-age, double-chinned guy running a construction company in Houston — he arrived at the job already famous and good-looking, with an abundance of swagger. 

Ezeli is the first to admit that he doesn’t know a ton about food — he just likes to eat it and celebrate the people who make it. After getting blown up by the food police for ordering his first La Taqueria burrito all wrong, Ezeli returned with District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who showed him how to order it dorado-style — crisped up on the plancha — like a proper San Franciscan. Regardless of his naïveté, Jenkins admires his intent: “He’s a shining star for our city. He’s such a positive person. I’ve never seen him with anything but a massive smile.”

Whether Ezeli wants food to be his focus is doubtful. He’s too busy building a cult of personality. In addition to Festus Eats, he runs an Instagram account called festusfits (opens in new tab) where he models his fashion: black-and-white houndstooth pants (“drip undefeated”), berets, brooches, a banana-yellow suit.

He’s also the executive director of Vision C (opens in new tab), a nonprofit youth basketball camp in Cameroon, and an ambassador for NBA Africa, and he has a YouTube channel (opens in new tab) with a few thousand subscribers. He hosted an 86-episode podcast called “Rebuilding the Beast (opens in new tab)” where he asked people about their inner child with the empathy of Oprah. His website describes him as an inspirational speaker, philanthropist, and connector. Boastful, perhaps, but not inflated. 

During his childhood, though, Ezeli was encouraged to fit into labels his family picked for him. He was born Ifeanyi Festus Ezeli, the oldest of five kids in a household that one summer counted as many as 41 people: the siblings, cousins, and other relatives passing through. Ifeanyi means “nothing is impossible with God,” and Ezeli has taken this to heart as he takes each giant step through life.

His mother was a lawyer who left her practice to raise her children, then opened a school after the youngest was born. It still serves around 1,500 kids a year. His father distributed Guinness beer. Festus skipped grades, finished high school at 14, and was supposed to go to medical school.

In July 2004, his parents put him on a plane to live with his uncle, a pediatrician in Yuba City, California. The uncle took one look at his nephew — at 14, he was 6-feet — and offered up another idea: How about basketball as a way to pay for undergraduate school? Festus, who had never played, agreed to try. He was not a natural. One of his favorite stories is about the time he scored his first points — into his own team’s basket.

It got better from there. Eventually, he spent four years playing for Vanderbilt. Ezeli went 30th in the 2012 NBA draft, selected by the Warriors. The medical school plan, by then, was a memory. Then his knees went out. 

When you can no longer be who you planned to be, you have to rethink your purpose in this world. Ezeli was once asked what he wants to be known for, and he replied, “I want to be known for my heart.” 

Back at 9JaGrills, Ezeli asks the owner, Tobi Sobo, where he’s from, then about the suya — the peanut-based spice mix that dusts the chewy skewered grilled beef — and listens intently for several minutes as Sobo walks him through how it’s made. He has heard versions of this kitchen story in dozens of restaurants over the past year, and he listens to each as if it’s the first. 

When the egusi — a thick, spicy fish-stock-based soup of ground melon seeds, spinach, and palm oil — arrives, he challenges me to eat it like a real Nigerian, which means using the accompanying fufu, or pounded yam, as a utensil: Ball it up and press a little indentation in the center, forming a scoop. While I do my best to dip it into the delicious soup, making a mess, Ezeli, of course, keeps it tidy, using a fork for everything.

He also makes sure to keep the camera rolling (opens in new tab). He knows the utensil thing is sacrilege — particularly for his fellow Nigerians. (Later, when he posts the video, calling it a fufu-eating “master class,” he will respond to every one of their gentle chides — “We’re taking away your African card — what be this” — along with a flurry of laugh-crying emojis.) 

But in that moment, as he pops the food into his mouth, he’s dancing again — this time with absolute earnestness. He looks directly into the iPhone, which is propped up against a glass of hibiscus juice. You can feel his joy. “This is how you know I’m happy,” he says, his voice suddenly taking on a deeper Nigerian accent, his shoulders swaying. “I’m very happy.”