Our history

Forty years, then nine

The cooking is older than the restaurant by four decades. This is how one became the other, and what stayed exactly as it was.

The years

How it got here

Nine of them, and one of them is the only one that matters.

1978

A compound off Sixth Circular

Ama Bediako starts cooking for whoever turns up on a Sunday. It is not a business and she is offended by the suggestion. This carries on for forty years.

2015

Kojo comes home

Ten years of other people's kitchens in Kumasi and London. He arrives with a plan for a modern West African tasting menu, which his grandmother describes as a lot of small food.

2016

The furniture shop

A shell four doors down from the compound, painted black over one weekend. Opens in October with eleven dishes, thirty-two seats and a charcoal grill where the window used to be.

2017

The gas comes out

Six months of trying to run both. The gas line is capped in March and has never been reopened, which is either principle or stubbornness depending on who you ask.

2019

The yard

The plot behind is taken over, cleared, and planted. Twenty-two more seats under the tree, and the room stops turning people away on a Friday.

2021

Ama

She dies in June, having eaten here every Sunday for five years and complained about the palm nut soup for four of them. The room closes for a week. The soup takes longer now.

2023

The bar list

Esi makes the argument that sobolo, palm wine and asaana deserve the same attention as gin, and then makes the drinks that prove it. Half the bar's covers now start with one.

2025

Nine years

Sixty-four seats inside, twenty-two out, nine in the kitchen on a Friday, and six dishes that have never once left the board.

2016

Opened, in October

40

Years of cooking behind it

62k

Plates sent out since

0

Gas burners, still

A pot of jollof cooking over an open fire, the way the kitchen started

What has not moved

The pepper base

Everything on the board that is red starts in the same pot: scotch bonnet, red onion, ginger, tomato, and the better part of an afternoon.

It is Ama's, unchanged, and it is the only recipe in the building that is written down — on the wall, in her handwriting, in case anybody gets clever.