Food guide
Eating in Ghana
Lists of Ghanaian dishes are not much help to someone standing in front of a counter with no menu on it, because the cuisine does not really work as a set of named plates. It works as a structure: a starch, and a soup or stew to go with it, eaten with the right hand. Once that is clear, ordering becomes straightforward everywhere in the country — and the food, which is genuinely one of the best reasons to come to Ghana, opens up considerably.
Updated 2026-08-16
The grammar: a starch and a soup
The starches are the first half. Fufu is cassava and plantain pounded to a smooth, dense, slightly elastic mass — the most famous, and the one visitors are most often warned about for no good reason. Banku and kenkey are both fermented maize, banku smooth and served warm, kenkey wrapped and steamed in leaves with a distinct sourness that grows on people quickly. Omo tuo is rice moulded into balls, softer and more forgiving. In the north, tuo zaafi made from millet or maize takes the same role.
The soups and stews are the second half, and they are where the cooking lives. Light soup is a clear, fiery tomato-and-pepper broth, usually with goat or fish, and is the standard partner for fufu. Groundnut soup — peanut-based, rich and thicker — is the one most visitors fall for. Palm nut soup is deeper and heavier again, made from the pulp of palm fruit. Okro stew is thickened and deliberately viscous, which divides opinion honestly. Add grilled or fried fish and a pepper sauce and you have most of what the country eats.
The eating itself is worth getting right because it is easy. You use your right hand only, tear a small piece of the starch, press a dip into it with your thumb, and use it to scoop the soup. You do not chew the fufu so much as swallow it — this is the part people find odd and it is entirely normal here. Water is brought for washing hands before and after, and cutlery is available almost anywhere if you would rather, with nobody minding either way.
Rice dishes, and the jollof question
Rice is the other pillar, and jollof is its headline — rice cooked in a tomato, pepper and onion base until it takes up the colour and the flavour, served with chicken, fish or goat and usually a little salad and fried plantain. It is a genuinely great dish and it is also the subject of the most public culinary argument in West Africa. Ghana and Nigeria contest the title loudly, publicly and with enormous enjoyment; Senegal, where the dish originates, watches the pair of them with some patience. Nothing here is going to settle it. Try it in both places if you can, and expect to be asked your opinion, which is part of the fun.
Waakye is the one to know beyond jollof, and it is arguably the more characteristic meal. Rice and beans cooked together with dried millet leaves, which turn the whole thing a deep reddish-brown, served as a plate assembled from a set of add-ons: spaghetti, boiled egg, fried plantain, a piece of fish or meat, and — essential — shito, the dark, intense, dried-fish-and-pepper sauce that is Ghana's great condiment. Waakye is properly a breakfast, sold from stalls in the morning and often gone by mid-day, which catches out visitors who go looking for it at dinner time.
Red red is the other dish to seek out: black-eyed beans stewed in palm oil, served with fried plantain, and the name describes both halves. It is one of the country's best vegetarian meals, though worth checking whether fish has been used in the stew if that matters to you.
The chop bar, and eating on the street
A chop bar is a small local eating house, and it is where Ghanaians actually eat. There is usually no menu; there is a counter, a set of pots, and someone who will tell you what is in them. You say what starch you want and what soup you want with it, and it is assembled in front of you. The food is fresh because the turnover is fast, the portions are large, and it is by a considerable margin the best value eating in the country. Pointing is a perfectly acceptable way to order and asking what something is will be met with patience rather than impatience.
Street food runs alongside it. Kelewele — plantain diced, spiced with ginger and pepper, and deep-fried — is sold in the evening and is close to addictive. Bofrot are the sweet fried dough balls sold from covered basins in the morning. Roasted plantain with groundnuts is the classic walking snack, and grilled tilapia with banku, eaten at a plastic table with your hands, is one of the country's great meals wherever there is water nearby.
The practical advice is the same as anywhere with an active street-food culture and does not need to be nervous: eat where there is a queue and a high turnover, favour things cooked to order in front of you, and be more careful with anything that has been sitting out. The tap water is a separate question and the standard answer is sachet or bottled water rather than the tap.
Regional differences, heat and drinks
The country divides roughly in two on the plate. The coast and the forest south run on cassava, plantain, maize and a great deal of fish — fresh from the Atlantic in the west and centre, and from the great lake inland. The north is drier, and the food follows: millet and sorghum instead of cassava, tuo zaafi in place of fufu, more grain and less plantain, and a distinct set of soups. Northern food is much less written about and worth seeking out if your route takes you up there, which the Mole and the savanna north guide makes the case for.
On heat: Ghanaian food is properly spicy rather than incidentally so, and pepper is a foundation rather than a garnish. Light soup is genuinely hot, and shito is intense by design. This is easy to manage — asking for less pepper is completely normal, understood everywhere, and not treated as an insult — but arriving without knowing it catches people out on the first day.
To drink, the everyday options are the local lagers, which are good and cold, and a set of soft drinks including bissap, the deep-red hibiscus infusion sold chilled in bags. Fresh coconut is sold from carts by the roadside, cut open in front of you. Palm wine is the traditional drink, tapped fresh and fermenting from the moment it is collected, so its strength depends entirely on how long ago that was — which is worth knowing before the second glass.