Zoe Adjonyoh

Zoe Adjonyoh is a British writer and cook, founder of "Zoe's Ghana Kitchen", a Ghanaian pop-up restaurant brand,[1] which is also the title of her debut cookbook.[2]

Biography

She was born in Essex, England, in the late 1970s[3] to a Ghanaian father and an Irish mother.[4] Adjonyoh taught herself to cook the foods of her father's home country, and she began a restaurant called Zoe's Ghana Kitchen in her home in East London, after the popularity of a stall she set up selling peanut stew when a local arts festival was taking place nearby in 2010.[5][6][7] Although she had started making and selling Ghanaian food in order to fund her Creative Writing MA at Goldsmiths, University of London,[8] her tutor suggested that to focus on her business might be a better way into writing the memoir she was working on.[3] She has since run pop-up restaurants in different London venues as well as in other places, including Berlin and New York.[1][9] She has said: "The point of Ghana Kitchen is to take people on a food journey where they can try ingredients and flavours they've never tasted before. There's that sense of adventure and I'm trying to guide people with that."[10]

She is the author of a 2017 book also called Zoe's Ghana Kitchen,[11] about which Ruby Tandoh said: "If you are what you eat, then Adjonyoh’s debut cookbook, Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen, is a kind of edible portrait: a celebratory, intelligent, often chaotic rendering of the person she is, and of her heritage."[12] According to Wendell Brock's review of the book: "In her delightfully quirky book, Adjonyoh shares her spin on the food of her Ghanaian father’s homeland, with some funny side notes on her experiences in Ghana and how she’s mashed up her Irish mum and her African father’s native cuisines. There are even soundtracks to play while cooking and eating. I suspect there’s a memoir in the making here."[13]

Adjonyoh contributed a short piece about her father to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.[14]

Awards and recognition

Adjonyoh won the 2018 Culinary Iconoclast Award.[3] In 2018 she was appointed as a judge for the Great Taste Awards, "the Oscars of the food and drink world".[15]

References
  1. Victoria Stewart, "Young British Foodie: Zoe Adjonyoh, founder of Zoe's Ghana Kitchen", Evening Standard, 21 August 2013.
  2. "Debut Cookbook from Zoe's Ghana Kitchen: It's Ghana Be Tasty!", Aduna's World, May 2017.
  3. Suchandrika Chakrabarti, "From a self-fundraising MA student to award-winning chef, Zoe Adjonyoh knows being the first isn’t always easy", gal-dem, 4 July 2018.
  4. "Zoe Adjonyoh" at Great British Chefs.
  5. "#BrixtonBonus – Meet the Winner: Zoe", Brixton Pound, 22 April 2016.
  6. "Bringing West Africa to the world: Ghanaian chef Zoe Adjonyoh's recipes", CBS News, 9 June 2018.
  7. Eleanor Langdale, "Zoe Adjonyoh Wants You to Step Inside Her Ghana Kitchen", Vice, 3 May 2017.
  8. Stephen Hoare, "Postgraduate students: earning to learn", The Guardian, 5 March 2013.
  9. Korsha Wilson, "Chef Zoe Adjonyoh Is Not Here to Summarize African Food for You", Food and Wine, 20 February 2020.
  10. Lydia Winter, "Zoe's Ghana Kitchen's Zoe Adjonyoh on African food in London", Foodism, 28 March 2017.
  11. Susan Devaney, "Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen: these West African recipes will reawaken your soul this autumn", Stylist, 20 September 2018.
  12. Ruby Tandoh, "Zoe Adjonyoh: ‘My only access to Ghana was the food’", The Observer, 23 April 2017.
  13. Wendell Brock, "Is African food the next big thing? This Ghanaian-born writer thinks so", AJC, 27 July 2017.
  14. Margaret Busby, "From Ayòbámi Adébáyò to Zadie Smith: meet the New Daughters of Africa", The Guardian, 9 March 2019.
  15. Xanthe Clay, "Behind the scenes of the Great Taste Awards, the Oscars of the food and drink world", The Telegraph, 28 July 2019.
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