African food is the next big thing, says chef at Ghana Kitchen pop-up
- By: Rod Kitson | The Evening Standard - UK
- Apr 22, 2015
- 2 min read
The chef behind a Ghanaian pop-up restaurant believes London is seeing the beginning of an explosion in African food.
Zoe Adjonyoh, whose Ghana Kitchen is in Clapham until the end of next month, hopes to make the cuisine less “intimidating” to encourage diners to try it.
Adjonyoh, 37, told the Standard: “There is a very fast-growing community of people in my age group, second generation, who are doing supper clubs and pop-ups representing their cuisine, whether that’s Sierra Leone or Ethiopia, Nigeria or Ghana. There is a new food movement in African cuisine.
“Some of it is intimidating, like the names of the dishes. It’s about acclimatising to it. I’m familiarising people with the ingredients and restyling it with names people can understand.”
The chef, originally from Woolwich, has a Ghanaian father and an Irish mother. Now living in east London, she has brought her Ghana Kitchen to the King & Co pub on Clapham Park Road.
“When Chinese and Indian food first arrived in the UK it was repurposed to make it accessible to the audience here,” she said. “Without making it accessible you don’t reach a wider audience. This will do the same for Ghanaian food, I hope. You walk down a high street and you’ve got four or five Italians, Mexicans — why isn’t African food on that map?”
The menu includes nkatenkwan — spiced peanut stew — and jollof, a rice dish with meat, fish or vegetables.
She has “remodelled and refined” these traditional dishes, based on family recipes.
She explained: “My dad would come home with weird and wonderful ingredients and cook stuff, also my mum would cook those dishes.
“It was her interpretation of his food then my interpretation. There are similarities in the food cultures between Ireland and Ghana. Big families, big plates of food, people eating together. The diet is quite simple in terms of staples.
In the next five years I think we are going to see a massive explosion in African food, first being represented at street food level, which will lead to the high street.”
Source: Standard.co.uk
By: Rod Kitson
