Women Who Travel Podcast: Running a Chocolatier and Nomadic Dining Experience Out of Accra, Ghana

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·22 min read

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Selassie Atadika is a chef, food innovator, and the founder of Midunu, a nomadic private dining experience based out of Accra, Ghana. She’s also happened to have visited 40 African countries. Lale chats with Atadika about the rich bounty of diverse cuisine to be found across Africa, some of her most memorable travel experiences, and the enduring intersection of food and politics.

Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. I'm Lale Arikoglu. And this is another episode of Women Who Travel. I'm talking to Selassie Atadika. She's a Ghanaian chef, food educator and also owns an artisanal chocolate business. But more about that later in the show.

Selassie Atadika: I am going to tell you my love story for the food in the continent.

LA: While traveling for the UN, Selassie visited, worked and ate her way through 40 African countries. I'm speaking to her at her home in Accra, in a residential suburb. The windows are open, they're singing from a house nearby as well as the sounds of Birdsong.

SA: I learned so many amazing lessons from country to country. It was interesting to me because I kept thinking to myself that I'm getting an opportunity to see and taste what a lot of people don't know about, including Africans. And so I coined the term new African cuisine when I came back, it wasn't necessarily beautiful or cute or sexy food. It was more about food that had a sense of place. Food that was looking towards the future and not just about what you were eating today, but what are we going to eat in 2050?

Many of the countries that I had been to had this idea whether it was as intense as an Ethiopia when you have visitors at home. If they really want to show you true hospitality, they can actually feed you with their hands. And then in Senegal and in different parts of West Africa, including Ghana, there's a communal plate. So everyone sits around a plate and we share the plate of food together. Even in Ghana, in urban areas, like in Accra, if you go to an office on a Friday, sometimes you'll see the staff. Even in a government office eating a meal together or sharing breakfast together. So it's really about community.

My family moved to the US when I was about six years old. And in our mother tongue, there's a phrase which my dad would always say when he would get home, we'd have meals together. And it would be, "Vamidanu." Vamidanu means come, let's eat. And it was an invitation, and it's always something that you never ate alone, and food was shared and was communal. And so that for me was the first principle was this idea of weed and community.

LA: That saying that your father would use when you would sit down for dinner. Am I correct in thinking that part of it is the name of your restaurant?

SA: Exactly. Yeah. I shortened it and it's Midanu.

LA: Tell me a little bit about how that vision came to life.

SA: I was living in Senegal. I was there for about six years working for the UN. I started a cooking club with some friends, and it became this extreme sport, an extreme hobby. And—

LA: Wait, were you competing with each other? How does that work?

SA: Yeah. It started off just as a cooking club. And I'm a little competitive. So I was living in Senegal, and one of the challenges that we kept seeing was that we were using grocery stores, and a lot of them were actually grocery stores from France that were in Senegal. And so we were like, "We kept eating these imported foods. What are we going to? Let's try something that forces us to use more local ingredients." So had some colleagues and I said, "Hey, why don't we just get together every month and whatever's in season, let's just go ahead and try to make dishes from it. And well, while we're at it, why don't we just have a voting criteria?" Chase creativity. Use of ingredients.

And it turned out that there were two other people that were as obsessed as I was. And so month after month, we would spend a lot of time coming up with really interesting dishes. And we ended up going to the Culinary Institute of America. And ended up doing the ProChef Level 1. And when we got back to Senegal, we decided that we should just do a pop-up every month just to keep our skills going.

LA: Those meals in different places in Senegal were a culinary innovation lab for Selassie's cuisine. Strangers sat at a communal table and they all offered feedback.

SA: When I moved back to Ghana, we started off with these dinners that were moving around the city. That's how we had done it in Senegal. So we started off very much nomadic. My lifestyle had been prior to that. And that's really one of the reasons we called it the nomadic dinner. For me, the phrase pop-up didn't make sense to me. Nomadic is our groups of people within the continent, and that just felt true to where I was. So we started off moving around the city. And allowing people to meet in different locations every month.

LA: Do you have a brick and mortar space? You do, right?

SA: We now have Midanu house in Accra. And diners now come here for both our nomadic dinners and our private dinners. Where the main kitchen is it's actually where my family home was when I was a child. And so we've used that space. We have a kitchen here and a dining space here as well.

LA: Coming up. The food that Selassie's family cooked growing up.

We're back with Selassie Atadika.

SA: For us moving to the US was something that happened not necessarily by choice. There was a coup d'etat. And so my family had to at that time for our own safety. We ended up in the US and food was one of the ways that we kept connecting to our culture. And my mom did an amazing job, especially if you think about the early 80s, there were not African shops or places where you could get these ingredients. My mom was actually really creative and she worked really hard to make sure we had home cooking all the time. I joke, but it's true. I think it was twice a year she did not cook, which was her birthday and Mother's Day. And that's when I took over.

LA: I'm glad that she did insist that she was going to sit down and be like, "I'm not doing it these two days."

SA: Well, so no, those two days, that was when I actually stepped in. So I think, let's see, she took the lead and I was her assistant. I remember there was one year my mom had to come back to Ghana for family reasons, and so it was American Thanksgiving. And so she said, "Hey, can you prepare everything?" And I said, "yeah, I can definitely take care of everything." And so she said, "But I'm going to order the turkey." We went to go pick up the turkey, and it was actually, she ordered a, I think it was a duck or a goose. I'm not sure why she made that decision.

LA: Arguably more delicious than turkey, I will say.

SA: Yeah, definitely juicier. So we did that and there's a tomato gravy that my mom makes that was the African element on the table. And so she wasn't there, so I had to do it. So I made it, put on the table, and then we started to eat. And my brother, who is a super taster, he took one small fork full of it and was like, "What is this?" And I was like, "What do you mean?" And he was like, "What is this?" And I was like, "It's gravy like mom makes." And he was like, "It's definitely not like mom makes." And that was my rude awakening that I needed to spend time.

And that's when I really started my journey learning how to cook traditional dishes from Ghana because I realized that, well, I have to follow my mom in the kitchen. Literally, I would be behind her with a measuring cup trying to figure out, she uses a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and she's able to repeat it, but mine never tastes the same. So I started very actively trying to document what she was doing. And then that's when I also started my obsession with buying cookbooks from every African country I ever visited. So I have a pretty intense collection, mostly like auntie and grandmother books that you would find in country that are self-published or locally published, but just amazing flavors.

LA: Speaking of amazing flavors, there must be some incredible ingredients and spices that are used that you probably can only find in various parts of Africa. Are there any that you found in those cookbooks that you've been bringing back and incorporate now?

SA: Well, I moved back to Ghana 10 years ago, and when I would go to the market and I'd be like, "What's the name of this spice or what's the name of this ingredient?" People would always tell me it's what we use in such and such soup. And I was like, "Okay, but beyond what soup it's used for, what's it called and where does it come from?" So one of my favorites is, it looks like a carob pod, but it has four wings on it. It looks like a cross basically. It does not have an English name, it has a botanical name, which is quite difficult for me to pronounce. So that's one of the spices that I love. It's what I love about it is that it has caramel buttery notes. Traditionally, we use it in a lot of savory soups and stews. It's one of the ingredients that I now put on everything from meats and soups to using it in our chocolates.

Another ingredient that I love from West Africa is called Dawadawa. It's a fermented African locust bean. And it's fermented by women in northern and Sahelian parts of Ghana. And it's also a spice you would find in versions by different names in Senegal, in Nigeria. And it is, I call it like an umami bomb.

LA: Oh, I love that.

SA: This fermented locust bean is the vegetarian version of almost like a closest thing I can describe it is like a Thai fish sauce. So it's got a lot of funk to it.

My food actually has always been very much about what should we be eating now so we not lose our culinary heritage?

LA: What are some of those things that should be eaten?

SA: I think it's important for us to eat much wider in our food system. And so when it comes to grains, some of the ones that are very much used in traditional cuisines in the continent are millet, sorghum, teff, fonio, and these are all grains that do amazingly well with climate change. They do amazingly well with poor quality soil. And they're actually all gluten-free. So these are all fantastic grains that we should be using more and more.

It's also being more plant forward. So a lot of the indigenous ingredients and proteins are like egusi, which is a wild melon seed. We're talking about reyre, which is another seed that's coming. We're talking about groundnuts, we're talking about Bambara beans, we're talking about cow peas. And these are all humble beans and lentils and seeds, but they give you an amazing pack for punch, but they also have wonderful textures. So a lot of Sub-Saharan Africans are lactose intolerant. So when you start looking at how do you create creamy dishes? I do that with blending a lot of these nuts and seeds and beans into dishes to create that silky warm texture that you're looking for. I use coconut milk in a lot of dishes. I use cashew milk.

Other elements that came through for me was the no waste approach to cooking and making sure you use everything. So for example, I'm always surprised when I'm in the US and I am talking to people, even farmers, and I'm talking about sweet potato leaves. And I'm like, sweet potato greens are a dish that you see in many parts of West Africa, particularly in Sierra Leone. And if you think about it, you're not just eating the sweet potatoes, but the leaves are edible, huge amounts of beautiful nutrition coming from them. And my personal aim is more about creating opportunities for smallholder farmers in the continent to be able to continue to grow what thrives in our land. And to be able to grow what my grandmother, my great-grandmother was probably eating rather than what somebody else wants to eat in exchange for whatever price they're willing to pay you for that.

LA: You are almost as much of an educator as you are a chef. Do you see yourself as an ambassador for new African cuisine, or is that something you aspire to be?

SA: Yeah, I think I had been working with the UN for a while and traveling around. And sometimes it was colleagues that didn't understand the flavors that I had grown up with. And I just kept hearing a lot of negative feedback about African cuisines. And I wanted to take a moment to actually show what was possible, show what I had fallen in love with as a child, and still very much felt strongly about it was like, "You don't understand, and I'm going to try to explain it to you."

LA: I'm sure so many people who are listening are eager to do at least some sliver of the travels throughout Africa that you've got to do. Obviously few people are going to get to do 40 countries. But as you were exploring and getting to know this massive, varied continent, I'd love to know if there were any moments where through food you were truly surprised, or a moment that just charmed you and it came to this place that you're connected to and that you were trying to discover?

SA: I'll just give a specific example. I was living and working in South Sudan. And there was this roadside, I would call it like a grill shop. So he had barbecued meat and stuff. And a friend of mine was like, "Hey, let's go check this place out. I hear it's really good." And so we went. And I sat and I ate this. I guess we would almost like a kebab or some grilled meat. And as I ate it, I had memories flooding to me that I couldn't quite understand and I had to stop. And then I said, "I need to talk to the chef, the cook." And I found someone who could help and translate for me. And so it ended up being a nomadic person who had settled in South Sudan because of the conflict in Darfur. But what he had cooked was something that I knew from West Africa.

So this is in Ghana, we would call it chichinga. In Nigeria, they would call it suya. But the flavors, I automatically recognized those flavors as food that I knew. Even though I was in a land far, far away. That's when I just, I said to myself, "It would be amazing to actually write a book about food and migration." Because I think we all are tied to our food and we travel with our food. When you see what migration throughout the continent looks like, that dish when they moved from country to country, how it evolved, those stories for me are just the ones that just are magical. Because you can't put your finger on it. You don't know exactly what it is. But you know you're home.

LA: As part of her work, Selassie's chosen to focus on chocolates. It's a luxury food, but one that's also politically charged, that after the break.

Back with Women Who Travel and making chocolate truffles in Ghana.

SA: I call myself an accidental chocolatier. So we started off doing the dinners, and then at the end of the meal, we would give out like the Petit fours or the mignardise. And I just said, "Well, the dinners about underutilized ingredients, and so we're going to do something with chocolate." Because cocoa is very much an ingredient available in Ghana, but it was always cocoa from Ghana, not chocolate from Ghana. So it was being underutilized in country.

So we started doing the truffles, and I've just realized that when you take someone, people know, which is chocolate, and you add something that they don't know, you really start a place for conversation. So people started asking for these chocolates outside of the dinners, and I at that time thought it can't be that hard. And I've learned so much more about chocolate in the industry over the last eight years, but in many ways, the chocolate has been, I would just say cash crops in general, whether it's coffee, whether it's tea, the introduction of cash crops into the African continent has led to the decimation of our indigenous agriculture. And so for me, the chocolates at the end of the meal is a very bittersweet comment, but I think the future is bright if we really start thinking about what and how we want to grow.

LA: Ghana is the second-largest producer of cocoa in Africa, from what I understand. And yet that was all getting exported out for other countries to enjoy and turn into chocolate. And this was something that Ghanaians were missing out on.

SA: Yeah, it's been something like between 70 and 80% of the world's cocoa beans are coming from West Africa. The top two countries are Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. So you're getting Ghanaians and Ivorians to grow cocoa beans, which they don't consume. You are telling them the price at which you're going to buy it from them. You're also telling them that they can't process it, so that you're just going to take it away from them and turn it into something that you want.

So what you'll see for the last few years, 2% of what you pay for a chocolate bar actually is what goes to the cocoa farmer, who's the one that takes most of the risk. He's the one that if there's a crop failure, he loses out. He's the one that if some pest comes in and takes over his beans or his tree, he's out of business.

The truffles are named after some women that I know who inspire me, like my mother. So I have a truffle named after my mother. I have truffles named after women I don't know.

LA: Wait, what's that truffle? What's that truffle called so people know?

SA: Yeah, that's the Ajoa truffle. So Ajoa is, my mother was born on Monday. So in Ghana we have day names. So the day you're born is quite important. And that truffle is an infusion of five different West African spices. For me, it's a conversation about her ingenuity and her ability to create balance for us as we were growing up outside of Ghana. And then I have another truffle that's named after Wangari Maathai, who was a female Nobel Prize winner from Kenya. She did amazing work for the environment and for women's rights in Kenya. And while I lived in Kenya, I spent about two years there. I was obsessed with the chai tea there. And so it's a chai infused truffle.

LA: What did it take to ensure your business was all women? Because I feel like, often, that it ends up being much harder in practice than in theory. What was the process like?

SA: Well, I started off not necessarily intentional about it, but my first sous chef that I hired was a man. And then I slowly realized that he would do whatever he wanted to do. He wasn't necessarily listening and taking my lead. I realized I didn't like his leadership style, so I quickly just decided that the best way forward was for me to be more involved, be more engaged, and be more intentional about who I brought on.

I also got to see a lot of the women who were coming into my kitchen at that time didn't necessarily have a lot of opportunities, but were really willing to work. So even on my team now, some of them are single moms and others have been young women who have finished high school, but maybe didn't have the resources to go to college. And so for me, I made decision that it was more about people's attitude than their aptitude. And because I felt that I could teach them.

LA: Have you ever had any mishaps in the kitchen? Have there ever been any recipes that have gone a little awry?

SA: Oh yeah, definitely. I think I would say some of my big challenges have been actually on the chocolate side. Chocolate is extremely temperamental. And one or two degrees could change everything. So I've had tempering issues because the room was too warm and the chocolate has bloomed and you have to redo everything. I really wanted to do fruit collections with the chocolate. And so because we have amazing fruit here, and I've had to learn to play and be more intentional about my water content. So fruit clearly has a lot of liquid in there. And so chocolate does not like humidity, doesn't like water. So those are some of the things that have happened in the kitchen that went very wrong. But I think for me, I always, with all the failures come success.

LA: Before we started recording, I was talking about how desperate I am to go to Ghana. I would love to go to Accra. What should I eat when I get there?

SA: Well, I would say that my favorite street food is Kelewele. It is a spiced fried plantain, and I am obsessed with everything plantain. So that's one of the street food items. It's basically ripe plantain that has ginger, chili and some local spices. And another plantain dish that I absolutely love is one called Tatale and Aboboi. It is overripe plantain. So when it's turning black and someone is thinking about throwing it away, we definitely don't. You mash it, you add some flour to it, and then some onions and some seasoning. It's fried and served with bambara beans. Bambara beans are a beautiful bean that comes from Sahelian parts of West Africa. They grow underground like groundnuts or peanuts. And I've had birthdays where I will just go and have that and a glass of champagne.

LA: I'm eager for more intel like where to go and what to do in Accra, but also in Ghana more generally?

SA: There are amazing contemporary African artists from El Anantri. We've got galleries, we've got artists that are all based either in Accra as far as Ibrahim Muhammad in Red Clay in Tamale. So that's something that's definitely fun to do. There are beautiful nature walks, bird watching, there are beautiful waterfalls in the Volta region, so lots to do if you walk, you love nature. There's a lot of that outside of our crop.

LA: Selassie this has been such a beautiful conversation. You've made me very hungry. You've made me desperate to visit Ghana and lots of other places in Africa, a continent that I have fairly scratched the surface of. If people want to follow your work, your chocolates, your cooking, everything else, where can they find you on the internet?

SA: On Instagram, I am S-A-T-A-D-I-K-A. And then you can also find our dining experiences on Instagram at Midunu, M-I-D-U-N-U. And for the chocolates, it's @ M-I-D-U-N-U-CHOCOLATES with an S.

LA: If you are planning a trip to Ghana or you simply feel inspired by this episode, clearly the way to plan your trip is around the breadth of its food. Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel. I'm Lale Arikoglu and you can find me on Instagram at @Lalehannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus, James Yost, Vince Fairchild, and Pran Bandi. The show is mixed by Ammar Lau at Macrosound. Jude Kampfner of Corporation for Independent Media is our producer. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's, head of Global Audio.

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler

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