Accra eats in public. The best food in the city is cooked on charcoal at the roadside, ladled from enamel bowls at chop bars and wrapped in leaves before you have finished ordering. Restaurants exist, and some are excellent, but the city's real culinary map is a timetable: certain dishes belong to certain hours, and eating well here means eating on Accra's schedule.
Key facts
- Currency: Ghanaian cedi; carry small notes for street food and markets
- Heat: shito, the dark chilli-and-dried-fish condiment, is served with almost everything — go slowly
- Language: English is official, so ordering is easy
- Rule of thumb: eat where the queue of local office workers is longest
Before 8am — koko, koose and hot tea
Dawn belongs to koko, a spiced millet porridge, drunk from a bowl with koose (fried bean fritters) or bofrot, Ghana's soft round doughnuts. The other morning institution is the "tea" stall: sweetened milk tea or instant coffee with buttered sugar bread and fried egg, sold from a table with a bench.
8am to 11am — waakye, the great breakfast
The dish that defines Ghanaian mornings: rice and beans cooked with sorghum leaves until it turns russet, then loaded with spaghetti, boiled egg, wele (soft cowskin), gari, salad and a spoonful of shito. It is served wrapped, eaten anywhere, and it is arguably West Africa's finest breakfast. Waakye sellers open early and sell out — after late morning, you are too late.
Lunch — jollof, banku, fufu, red red
The midday canon is broad. Jollof rice, smoky and tomato-deep, is the national pride and the subject of a permanent argument with Nigeria. Banku — fermented corn and cassava dough — arrives with grilled tilapia and a fiery ground pepper sauce. Fufu is pounded to order and eaten with light soup or groundnut soup, using your right hand and no chewing. Red red, a black-eyed pea stew with fried plantain, is the vegetarian's reliable friend.
Afternoon — the snack hours
Around four o'clock the charcoal comes out. Kelewele, plantain cubes spiced with ginger and chilli and fried until they blacken at the edges, is the city's great snack. Add kofi brokeman — whole plantain roasted at the roadside and eaten with groundnuts — and chinchinga, skewered spiced meat from a grill. Wash it down with sobolo, chilled hibiscus with ginger.
Evening — tilapia in Osu
Dinner is grilled fish. Osu, the city's nightlife spine, does whole tilapia with banku and pepper sauce at every price level, and the fish is generally landed the same day. Chop bars elsewhere serve the same food to a mostly local room for far less.
Midnight — highlife and a cold bottle
The night runs late here. A cold Club or Star beer, a plate of kelewele arriving long after you stopped being hungry, and a live highlife or afrobeats band that shows no sign of stopping before sunrise.
Tip: Ask for pepper "on the side" at your first few meals until you have calibrated. Ghanaian pepper sauces are honest about their intentions, and the shito is stronger than it looks.
