Taking Inspiration from Ghanaian Chop Bars, Tatale Opens in London

Previously a supper club that served 70 people a night in various secret locations, Tatale was launched by Akwasi Brenya Mensa in 2021 to showcase West African cuisine. It now has its permanent residence at the Africa Centre in London. With a 33-seat restaurant and upper-level bar with standing room for 100 as well as terracotta and indigo walls and handmade kente cloth pillows and lamps, the new venue allows its founder to follow his two artistic passions: dinner and DJ’ing.

Mensa, a music impresario, turned restaurateur, has plenty of room to replicate the communal feel of chop bars and roadside canteens. On trips to his parents’ native Ghana growing up, Mensa witnessed chop bars, which he now tries to replicate in his chop bar experiences. “It’s dining in its purest form,” he states. “People are there for the food: businessmen, judges, and schoolchildren.” While meat is the main event in Ghanaian cuisine in general, it is swapped out in Tatale’s jollof rice with mushrooms or omo tuo, a sticky-rice cake dipped in spicy groundnut soup, when possible. For Mensa, however, cooking is a way to express his roots: “Food allowed me to express myself through my heritage,” he says. “That of a Ghanaian, a West African and an African.”