Eating out in Accra is cheap if you eat where Accra eats, and expensive the moment you sit down somewhere with a printed menu and air conditioning. The gap between the two is not a few percent. A plate of the same rice and stew can cost several times more a hundred metres apart.

This guide is about eating out. For the groceries you cook at home, the markets are a different subject.

— Where to buy food cheaply in Accra

The five ways Accra eats out

The chop bar. The local restaurant: a shed, plastic chairs, a few dishes, and a cook who has made one of them for thirty years. The cheapest sit-down food in the city and frequently the best.

— Chop bars in Accra

Roadside and market sellers. Waakye in the morning, rice and stew at lunch, kelewele and kebabs at night. Sold from a table, a pan or a head pan, usually by someone who sells one thing and nothing else.

Rice joints. Fried rice and jollof cooked to order on a street griddle, with chicken, and eaten late. Accra calls them check check, said to be after the sound of the spatulas on the hotplate.

Local restaurants. A room, a fan, a menu on the wall, the same dishes as a chop bar with a chair that does not wobble. Dearer than a chop bar, far cheaper than anywhere in a mall.

Restaurants and malls. Osu, East Legon, Airport Residential and Labone have Ghanaian fine dining, Lebanese, Chinese, Indian, Italian and Japanese, priced accordingly. Worth it for what they are, and not the answer to this question.

How to find the good one

The rule is the same everywhere in the city and it has never let anybody down:

Go where the queue is. A chop bar with people waiting has turned its stock over today, cooks the same thing every day, and is priced by competition with the one next door. An empty one at lunchtime is empty for a reason.

Eat at the hour the food is meant for. Waakye is a morning food and the good sellers are finished by midday. Kelewele and kebabs are evening food. Buying either at the wrong end of the day is how you get the pan that has been sitting.

Ask what is finished. In a chop bar the menu is whatever is left, and the right question is not “what do you have” but “what is finished”.

What to expect to pay

Deliberately no figures here. Restaurant prices in Accra are not published anywhere that could be cited and checked, and a number typed into this page would be wrong within a month.

What is reliable is the ordering, and it does not change:

  1. A roadside seller is cheapest.
  2. A chop bar is a little more, and you get a chair and a bigger plate.
  3. A local restaurant is a step above that.
  4. A mall or an Osu restaurant is several times any of them.

The single biggest saving is not which of these you choose but how often you eat out at all, which is the other half of a food budget.

— What a month in Accra costs — Cost of living calculator

Eating cheaply without getting ill

Busy stalls turn over stock, and turnover is most of the hygiene calculation. Beyond that:

  • Eat it hot, and eat it where it was cooked. Food that has been standing is the risk, not food from a roadside.
  • Drink pure water or a sealed bottle, not water from a jug.
  • Peel fruit yourself rather than buying it cut, when you are new.
  • Give it a fortnight. Most newcomers have a bad week and then stop having them.

Food vendors in Ghana are regulated: the Food and Drugs Authority licenses food businesses under the Public Health Act, 2012 (Act 851), and food handlers are meant to hold a health certificate from the assembly’s public health department, renewed yearly.

— Malaria, water and staying well

The dishes themselves

— Kenkey and fish — Banku and tilapia — What to eat in Accra