Since 2011
Our history
One borrowed coalpot, eight plastic chairs and a queue outside a barber's shop. Everything since has been an argument about how to keep that.
See the menuHow we got here
Fifteen years, told in the order they happened.
2011
Four tables behind a barber's shop
Kwesi Boateng borrows a coalpot and eight plastic chairs and starts selling chichinga to the queue outside Papa Nii's barbering salon on Oxford Street. Closing time is whenever the meat runs out, usually by nine.
2013
The lease on the yard
The plot behind the salon comes up. It has a mango tree, no roof and a drainage problem. It also has room for thirty people, which settles the argument.
2015
Adjoa Mensah arrives
A sous chef with four years at a hotel on the Ridge takes a pay cut to come and cook over charcoal. The soups board is hers from her second week and has been ever since.
2017
The roof, and a licence
A proper roof, a proper extractor, a bar licence and sixty-four seats. The mango tree stays; the tables are built around it, which is why table nine is a strange shape.
2019
Saturday classes begin
Six people ask to be taught the pepper base. Six people is still the number, four hundred classes later.
2021
Ten years, and a hard one
The anniversary passes with the room half-empty and the kitchen cooking takeaway out of the yard. Every one of the twenty-two people on the payroll is still on it at the end of the year.
2023
The grill goes travelling
The first off-site wedding, three hundred people on a beach in Prampram, cooked entirely on site. Nothing is reheated then either.
2026
Still here, still loud
Fifteen years, thirty-one dishes and one rule about pepper. The coalpot from 2011 is behind the bar and is not for sale.
Unchanged
The fire, and who is allowed near it.
Everything about this place has changed except the heat source and the hierarchy around it. Charcoal, laid by hand, lit at half past three, and nobody touches the grill in their first year.
It is not sentimentality. A gas flame gives you an even, obedient heat and food that tastes like a hotel. What comes off coals is uneven and a little bit angry, and that is the whole point of the cooking.
2018
Accra Restaurant Week — best grill
2020
Ghana Hospitality Awards — chop bar of the year
2022
Citi TV Food Files — kitchen of the month
2024
Accra Weekend Guide — top ten tables in the city
Nothing leaves the pass that the cook would not eat standing up.
It was said to a sixteen-year-old washing plates in 2011, by a man who has since retired to Cape Coast, and it is still how a plate gets sent back in this kitchen.
Tonight
There is a table with your name on it.
Two to twelve people, seven days less one. Tell us when, and whether anyone at the table is frightened of pepper.
Book a table