Accra’s best food is sold before eight in the morning, from tables on corners, to people on their way to work. It is also the cheapest meal of the day and the one visitors most often miss, because they are eating toast in a hotel.
— Where to eat cheaply in Accra
What is on the street at seven
Koko and koose. Fermented millet porridge, thin, sour and spiced with ginger and chilli, poured into a cup or a bag, with sugar and evaporated milk to taste. Koose are the fried black-eyed bean fritters that go with it. This is the classic Ghanaian breakfast and it costs almost nothing.
Waakye. Rice and beans, with the whole tray of accompaniments, eaten at breakfast by half the city. The good sellers are set up before six.
Tea and bread. “Tea” covers Milo, Lipton, coffee and hot chocolate, made with evaporated or powdered milk and a great deal of sugar, sold from a stand with a flask. The bread is sugar bread, tea bread or butter bread, often with an omelette, sardines or corned beef inside. The stands run from before dawn.
Rice porridge and oat porridge, sweetened, in a cup.
Hausa koko, the millet porridge in its Hausa form, usually with koose.
Boiled eggs and pepper, sold from a glass box with a bowl of raw pepper sauce beside it.
Roasted plantain with groundnuts, kelewele’s daytime cousin, sold from a grill.
Bofrot, the Ghanaian doughnut: sweet, dense, fried in the morning and gone by mid-morning.
Fruit, cut or whole. Pineapple, pawpaw, watermelon, mango in season.
Ordering
The same shape as everything else on an Accra street:
- Greet first. Everything goes better.
- Say how much, not how many. Naming an amount of money rather than a number of cups is the normal way to buy, and the seller fills to it.
- Say yes or no to sugar and milk in the koko or the tea, before it is poured.
- Carry small notes. A seller at half past six has no change, and this is the one reliable way to annoy them.
- MoMo is widely accepted, including by tea stands.
The practical advantages
It is the cheapest meal of the day by a distance. Breakfast on the street costs a fraction of a hotel breakfast and less than most lunches.
It is cooked fresh, at the hour it is meant for. Breakfast food is made in the morning and finished in the morning, which removes the main risk of eating out.
It is everywhere. Every junction, every office street, every school gate. You do not need to go looking.
If you want to eat breakfast sitting down
Chop bars are a lunch institution, not a breakfast one. For a sit-down breakfast there are local restaurants, the hotel dining rooms, and the cafés of Osu, Labone, East Legon and Airport Residential, which serve eggs, pastries and coffee at prices several times anything above.
— Chop bars in Accra — Street food in Accra — What to eat in Accra — What a month in Accra costs