To say chef Eric Adjepong has had a big year would be an understatement. Since January, he’s published his debut cookbook, Ghana to the World, and opened Elmina, a modern Ghanaian restaurant near DC’s U Street corridor. He’s already had a notable career as host of Food Network’s Alex vs. America, as well as a finalist on Bravo’s Top Chef, and his local ties include working at chef Kwame Onwuachi’s lauded former Afro-Caribbean restaurant Kith and Kin. Here, Adjepong reflects on reconciling past, present, and future through cooking.
“There’s a symbol that comes from West Africa, the region my family’s from: sankofa. It says you have to go forward and also recognize the past.
“Coming from folks from Ghana but being born in New York, I grew up with friends who were Albanian, Puerto Rican, Jamaican. I fell in love with the food I’d eat at their homes after playing baseball and basketball—stuffed cabbage, brisket, potatoes, rice and beans. As a child, this made me feel included, but it was [also] just my ‘normal’—all those moments of trying different food in a collective city like New York, then coming home to very traditional practices and celebrations.
“A lot of the recipes orally told by my grandmother, great-grandmother, or mom are gone. It’s important for me to capture how those dishes were, have been, and are still being made. Some of my earliest memories are tied to dishes like fufu [pounded plantain and cassava] and red red [stewed black-eyed peas]. But I’d be remiss if I wasn’t putting my spin on them from being enamored with so many cultures and being affected by so many different chefs.
“An example is the jollof duck pot at Elmina. It has jollof [a spicy red rice dish] as traditional as it possibly could be made, and then we pair it with a trio of duck egg, confit duck leg, and duck breast with tamarind glaze, which maybe pushes the boundaries a little bit. It’s being reminded of home, of a childhood memory—and now we’re going on a different adventure.
“People from Ghana [who come to the restaurant] are proud. And then there are people who’ve never dined at a Ghanaian restaurant before. Now they have the curiosity to go deeper and explore other countries—Nigeria, Senegal. Ghana is part of a region that has amazing food. Africa itself, the second-biggest continent in the world, has food that’s so unknown [here].
“Tradition and modernity is a false binary. All great chefs come from the backbone of a home cook. It does take time, but you [can] bring those two worlds together.”
This article appears in the July 2025 issue of Washingtonian.
