Food trends come and go, but it seems like nothing can topple the corporate bowl: a form infinitely replicated, its interchangeable parts mostly decontextualized, its contents varying only slightly.

Stay at your desk. Let the chilled, undressed lettuces and room-temperature piles of rice arrive, each optimized to assist you with your own optimization. The bowl is not just a vessel, but a template, a strategy, an intricate economy.

As the year comes to an end, several chains that specialize in bowls have reported a surprising dip in sales and you might wonder if this signals the end of our collective love affair. But I don’t know, was it ever really love?

Faced with a pricey, poorly assembled, anonymous squelch of carbs and fiber and protein, the most I might feel is relief, as if my appetite were an inconvenience in need of a fast and frictionless solution.

But it’s not, which is why I avoid a lunch bowl, if I can help it. At least, I did, until I found myself at ChòpnBlok in Houston, where I feasted on rice folded with dark greens under a heap of sweet, crumpled, almost caramelized plantains and skewers of thinly sliced beef suya, browned but tender, still blushing inside, dusted with a magnificent and revitalizing yaji.

For inspiration, Ope Amosu looked to the kind of chain restaurants that were built to scale, where flavors are often subdued to appeal to the broadest possible audience, focus-grouped to death. But the delight of ChòpnBlok is in its sure sense of self, its lively, multidimensional cooking and clear, delicious vision for modern food from the Black diaspora.

Mr. Amosu opened his first location of ChòpnBlok in 2021, a sliver of a stall inside a Houston food court with a short menu of bowls he called “Blok Pairings.” Each was a substantial meal that pulled together Mr. Amosu’s takes on West African curries and rice dishes, grilled meats, fried plantains and vegetables.

Last year, he expanded with a nearby spot in the Montrose neighborhood, with a bar, dining room and patio that could seat about 100 people, and a longer menu that pushed his culinary ethos further, expanding on ideas laid out by so many American sit-down chains.

Mr. Amosu had expected diners to walk to the register at the back of ChòpnBlok’s dining room, order and pay, then sit down. The problem: His new space, with its soft booths and African textiles, was quite beautiful and inviting. People wanted to sit down right away, to hold menus, to get comfortable. They wanted more time with each other, and with the satiny frozen drinks that slushed out of the machines at the bar.

Every restaurant changes, adapts, grows into itself, but Mr. Amosu had to quickly rethink his operation and switch to table service. ChòpnBlok can be slightly chaotic now, particularly at dinner time when the room gets packed and people come in looking for the host stand.

Staff shout and wave from wherever they are, drawing diners to the back counter, directing them to tables. And a whirlwind of servers — warm, informal and quick with the jokes — run the orders with their hand-held devices.

The food comes out as it’s ready. On my most recent visit, a Nigerian red stew, made with a base of peppers and onions, blessed short ribs with the smoky florescence of palm oil. Along with rice and beans, there were sweet, chewy plantains in the bowl to temper the glowing heat of Scotch bonnets.

But there’s a freewheeling style in many of these generous compositions, synthesizing flavors from across the Black diaspora. Yassa, a Senegalese curry you might have over rice or couscous, arrives as a deep pool of lush sauce, with a levee of peppery Nigerian-style shrimp and an earthy bank of waakye, the Ghanaian rice and beans stained purple from sorghum leaves (on the menu, the bowl is called the Black Star).

The Motherland, an easygoing coconut curry, held the same comfort as Kenyan kuku paka when I had it topped with chicken, edges blackened by a blowtorch. Liberian greens — here, a mix of collards with kale — are finely chopped, cooked until very silky then presented as a dip for long crinkly tongues of plantain chips. It’s utterly simple, but draws you in for more with the mouthwatering twang of not-too-much MSG — an international shortcut to building umami that tends to be used carefully, and layered with other forms.

Born in London and raised in Houston, a hub for West African immigrants since the 1980s, Mr. Amosu was working as a sales executive in oil and gas when he started to imagine his own modern West African restaurant, nothing fancy, but the kind of place he’d want to stop in for lunch when he was on the road.

He didn’t have prior experience as a chef, but Mr. Amosu worked nights at Chipotle as a prep cook and dishwasher, and studied with aunties in Houston and beyond, taking notes as he worked alongside the best home cooks and caterers in his network. (His cousin taught him how to make a rich jollof, which he smokes in the pot and then finishes with turkey sausage.)

It’s not unusual to look around the dining room and see someone dancing in their seat after taking their first bite, wiggling around, snapping their fingers. How good to be reminded a bowl can be filled with anything, even joy.

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