Ghanaian food is starch, stew, chilli and fish, and it is very good.
Eating well in Accra costs almost nothing if you eat Ghanaian, and a great deal if you insist on eating imported. A plate of waakye from a roadside seller runs around ₵20. The same money at a supermarket buys you a box of imported cereal.
The dishes
Waakye — rice and beans cooked with dried millet leaves, which turn it reddish-brown. Served with shito, gari, spaghetti, boiled egg, fried plantain, salad and meat or fish, all piled on. Eaten mostly at breakfast and lunch, and sold from a bowl at a roadside table. The national comfort food, and the first thing to try.
Jollof — rice cooked in a tomato and pepper base. Ghana and Nigeria have been arguing about whose is better for as long as anyone can remember, and you should not attempt neutrality on the subject in public.
Banku and tilapia — fermented corn and cassava dough, smooth and slightly sour, served with grilled tilapia, hot pepper sauce and onion. An evening dish. Eaten with your hands.
Fufu — cassava and plantain pounded to a smooth elastic dough, served in soup: light soup, groundnut soup, or palm nut soup. You do not chew fufu. You pinch a piece, dip it, and swallow. Chewing it marks you out instantly.
Kenkey — fermented corn dough, steamed in husks. Ga kenkey and Fante kenkey differ. Served with pepper, fried fish and sometimes shito. Sour, dense, and an acquired taste that most people acquire.
Red red — black-eyed beans stewed in palm oil, with fried ripe plantain. Vegetarian in its basic form, and one of the best cheap meals in the city.
Kelewele — ripe plantain cubed and fried with ginger, chilli and spice. Sold from stands in the evening. Sweet, hot, and impossible to stop eating.
Tuo zaafi (TZ) — a northern dish, millet or maize dough with a green soup, often ayoyo. Common in the zongo neighbourhoods.
Chichinga — spiced grilled kebabs, sold from roadside grills at night, dusted with a peanut and pepper spice mix.
Groundnut soup, palm nut soup, light soup — the three great Ghanaian soups, eaten with fufu, banku or rice balls.
Shito — a dark, intensely savoury chilli paste made with dried fish and prawn. It goes on everything. Take a jar home.
Gari — grated, dried, fermented cassava. Sprinkled on waakye, soaked as gari soakings, or made into gari fortor.
Bofrot — deep-fried dough balls, sweet, sold in the morning. Sometimes called Ghana puff-puff.
Where to eat
Chop bars — the local restaurant. A shed, plastic chairs, a few dishes, and a woman who has been cooking one of them for thirty years. Cheapest and frequently the best food in the city. Look for the one with the queue.
Roadside and market sellers — waakye in the morning, kelewele and chichinga at night. Entirely normal, entirely fine. Busy stalls turn over stock, which is the whole hygiene calculation.
Restaurants — Osu, East Legon, Airport Residential and Labone have everything from Ghanaian fine dining to Lebanese, Chinese, Indian, Italian and Japanese. Priced accordingly.
Markets — Makola, Kaneshie, Madina, Dome. Where you buy the ingredients, and much cheaper than any supermarket for anything grown in Ghana.
Supermarkets — Melcom, Maxmart, Palace, China Mall and the mall supermarkets. Necessary for imported goods, expensive for everything else.
How to eat
Use your right hand. Fufu, banku and kenkey are eaten with the hand, and the left hand is not used for eating. Bowls of water are provided for washing; use them before and after.
Pinch, dip, swallow. For fufu. Do not chew.
Say how much pepper you want. Ghanaian “small pepper” is not the same as yours. Start low and negotiate upward across visits.
Greet before you order. Ɛte sɛn? — it costs nothing and changes the interaction. — Learning Twi and Ga
Ordering is by pointing and quantity: give me waakye, with fish, and plenty shito. Nobody is expecting a formal sentence.
Vegetarians and vegans
More possible than you would expect, with attention.
Naturally plant-based: red red, gari soakings, kelewele, plantain and groundnut dishes, bean stews, many salads.
The catch: stock, dried fish, crayfish and shito find their way into a great deal of otherwise vegetable cooking. Shito contains dried fish and prawn. Ask specifically rather than assuming a vegetable dish is meat-free.
Accra has a growing number of explicitly vegetarian and vegan restaurants, concentrated in Osu, Labone and East Legon.
Drinks
Sobolo — hibiscus, ginger, pineapple and spices, served cold. Excellent, and the default non-alcoholic offer at any event.
Asaana — fermented corn drink, sweet and slightly sour.
Palm wine — tapped from palm trees, sweet when fresh, sharper as it ferments through the day.
Akpeteshie — distilled palm wine or cane spirit. Strong. Approached with respect.
Beer — Club and Star are the two you will be offered.
Pure water — the ubiquitous sachet. — Water in Accra
Staying well
Busy stalls are safer than quiet ones. Turnover means fresh food.
Hot food, freshly served, is the general rule.
Be careful with salads and cut fruit from street sellers early on, until your stomach has settled in.
Drink sachet or bottled water, not tap water.