High expectations: Akwasi Brenya-Mensa
(Picture: Photography: Natasha Pszenicki; Assistant: Monty Vann)In the field of London’s modern, West African-influenced restaurant menus, jollof rice is still basically a non-negotiable ubiquity. It remains the centrepiece of the multi-course offering at two Michelin-starred Ikoyi; it emerges from a smoke-filled cloche during every meal at Akoko; at Chuku’s, in Tottenham, they are still selling their reimagined quinoa version by the truckload. But you will not find it on the launch menu at Tatale — the landmark new pan-African restaurant from Ghanaian-British chef Akwasi Brenya-Mensa. And its omission, it turns out, is very much a considered choice rather than any sort of inadvertent oversight.
“I am not entering jollofgate,” he says, with a laugh, trademark beanie hat pulled low over his hair. “I am just not entering it. I can’t make heritage jollof; I’m not an aunty who has made it on her stove for 20 years. I can’t compete with any of that so I’m not going totry.” A thought strikes him. “In fact, I would be happy for people to bring a bowl of their aunt’s own jollof here so they can have it.”
I think that he is joking about this; a financially disastrous BYOJ policy that would see diners arrive at his new venture with their own tubs of leftovers. But if he isn’t, it would be wholly in keeping with this 40-year-old’s forward-thinking approach to mounting a business that is animated by a spirit of collectivism and cultural mission.
Tatale — which is pronounced “tat-ah-lay”, named for the Ghanaian plantain pancake — is housed in the new, swishly appointed Southwark home of The Africa Centre. It can lay a decent claim to being one of the most anticipated restaurant launches of the year and also, perhaps, the one that has picked out the most unconventional path towards its much-delayed opening. Originally pencilled in to launch in January, Tatale has instead become a kind of international roadshow for the last four months, popping up in Lisbon, Amsterdam, Puerto Rico and more for a series of sold-out dinners and exploratory tours through the eating habits of the global black diaspora.
“For me the tour was an opportunity to raise the profile of the project and also, like, test it,” he says. Splashed in warm terracotta tones, scattered with bold print cushions and plants, the restaurant’s small, 33-cover space evokes Africa without resorting to cliché. Brenya-Mensa adds: “It was evidence that we have this amazing food that can go everywhere. And it was also a way of putting a marker down. Like, we’re here to innovate, to be forward-thinking and to do things differently.”
Perhaps one of the most unexpected manifestations of this approach came at the end of last month, with the news that Brenya-Mensa was launching an ambitious £50,000 Kickstarter campaign. The stated aim is to raise funds for Tatale and also for a black hospitality incubator scheme called The Pan-African Social Club. It is, to be frank, quite unusual for a restaurant to embark on a funding drive a few weeks before it is due to open. What prompted him to make the move?
“My bank balance,” he laughs, not missing a beat. As he points out, for all the esteem that The Africa Centre affords (the iconic venue first opened in Covent Garden in 1964 and has hosted the likes of Desmond Tutu, Fela Kuti and Maya Angelou), it is a charity rather than a deep-pocketed venture capitalist investor. “There’s no way I would be able to afford a venue of this size and in this area [without them],” he adds. “But even with all of that taken care of, you’ve still got stock, staffing and lots of other things.”
Having “explored every other type of investment and got rejected from every grant”, Brenya-Mensa’s turn to crowdfunding represents something of a last resort. But if he feels any embarrassment then it is outweighed by a deep belief in the importance of the project. “How I have come to do this, going from supper club to restaurant, is not fun,” he says, “Obviously it has taught me lots and it was my journey but I would definitely like to make things easier for the people coming after. I don’t want to do [the Kickstarter]. The kind of person I am, I can’t think of anything worse. But this project is bigger than me. So I have to suck that up.”
I think if we execute properly we can change people’s perception of African cooking
Brenya-Mensa’s journey has definitely been an atypical one. Raised in Mitcham to parents who arrived from Ghana in the Seventies, his status as the eldest of three boys made him his mum’s “de facto sous chef” and, in turn, helped spark a fascination with cooking. After university in Sheffield, he hung around post-graduation and ultimately launched a MeatLiquor-ish burger brand and kitchen residency called The Juicy Kitchen.
It wasn’t until a couple of pivotal trips — one to Brazil in 2014, which sparked his first supper club, and another back to Ghana in 2019 — that the lightbulb for Tatale fully illuminated. A 2020 stint at James Cochran’s Islington restaurant 12:51 helped hone his craft and expand his scope. “I use the term pan-African to essentially mean black,” he says. “Brazil has the largest black population in the world outside of Africa and I didn’t know that until I went there. I was in this market, and I smelt something being cooked that reminded me of my aunt’s cooking. I wanted the menu [at Tatale] to reflect that and to reflect blackness.”
This is borne out by the opening offering at the restaurant — a concise six-item affair that skips across interlinked black food cultures via Caribbean-influenced ackee fritters, buttermilk chicken wings dusted in fiery Ghanaian “chichinga” seasoning, and red snapper moqueca, a red palm oil-enriched seafood curry inspired by that epiphanic moment in Brazil.
The tightness of the menu is another conscious choice (“Expectation management and consistency is something we can control,” he says), though he hopes it will double in size in six weeks. The undoubted breakout dish, however, is the omo tuo: a mashed rice ball surrounded by a glossy moat of nkatenkwan (aka groundnut, or peanut) sauce that has become so beloved Brenya-Mensa was berated when he left it off a supper club menu last July.
“It’s a Ghanaian dish and it’s not one where I’ve really been clever or progressed it,” he says. “I’ve made it look sexier but that’s it. Unless you’re from West Africa, you’re probably trying this dish for the first time. And so the fact it’s an unknown quantity, the fact it’s as traditionally made as possible, and the fact that the community chose it as a signature dish, rather than me, makes me really proud.”
This notion of African food as an unknown gastronomic quantity brings us back to Brenya-Mensa’s struggle to secure financing for Tatale. For all the growing visibility of West African-inspired restaurants there is still, he feels, a degree of apprehension from investors. “Unless you’re from the culture you maybe don’t see the value in it,” he notes, quietly. “If I was opening a place centred on European food, with the amount of press I’ve had, I don’t think I would have had a problem with investment.”
Ultimately, a lack of reference point for what Tatale is trying to do — a mid-range, contemporary pan-African restaurant — makes it harder to prove the concept’s viability. This, of course, makes businesses like this all the more rare. It is this vicious cycle that Brenya-Mensa is hoping to break. Yes, he’s aware of the hype and pressure attending tomorrow’s launch (“I mean, I don’t sleep very well”). True enough, he is struggling to find staff and, ahead of its July 18 deadline, the Kickstarter is some way off its final goal. But beyond his easy-going demeanour, there is clearly a flinty determination to succeed.
And it manifests most clearly in an answer to whether he feels pressure to balance cultural fidelity and broad appeal. “I feel like this restaurant is a bit of a gateway,” he says. “I don’t feel pressure to make it accessible, but I’m aware of what we represent and I think if we execute properly we can change people’s perception of African cooking. Maybe that means that someone might pop into the African restaurant near where they live, that they’ve never been into before, because they’ve tried a dish here. So I think the goal, apart from being successful, is to change patterns of behaviour. If we retain authenticity and if we’re progressive, then we can achieve accessibility through being excellent.” Tatale may sit in a storied old icon of black British diaspora culture. But the man behind it is out to make his own history.
