Ato Sam’s favourite Ghanaian dish is colloquially known as “Red Red”. The popular African stew – black eyed peas, served with fried plantains – is made using red pepper and red palm oil, hence the name.
It was also a popular menu item at a vegetarian café-cum-restaurant that Ato, 34, owned and ran in the southern Ghanaian seaside town of Cape Coast.
And since migrating to Australia in 2008 with his Australian wife, Amanda, he has kept his passion for cooking traditional Ghanaian fare simmering.
Ato recently began hosting monthly Ghanaian cooking workshops at the couple’s Mill Park home. “Now that I’m living here [Australia] and know the people, I said to myself, you’ve got something to give to the people,” he says. “And I’ve always had this talent in me about teaching African food and culture. I just wanted to share it.”
The couple spent their first three months in Australia in Bendigo, where Amanda’s parents live, before moving to Melbourne where Ato began working as a waiter at a Northcote cafe before moving into medical administration.
But a visit to the Collingwood Children’s Farm started him on another path.
“I went to the chefs and told them, ‘This is what I do’. So I cooked them a beautiful dish and they liked it,” Ato says of how his local culinary journey began.
It was a few years before his own home-based cooking classes took off, but his business evolved to the point where he no longer wanted to continue his job in medical administration. Three months ago he quit and began focusing on his cooking classes and cultural exchange tours to Ghana, a project he began in 2009.
Ato’s four-to-six-week tours offer Australians the chance to experience the Ghanaian culture from a very local perspective. They stay in Ato’s family home, are taught the basics of the language, tour the country and, of course, learn how to cook like a native.
And despite little marketing aside from a Facebook page, a website and word-of-mouth, Ato’s Abusua Pa Experience tours (Abusua Pa means “good family” in the Ghanaian language), like his cooking classes, have proven highly popular. Learning how to cook his Red Red stew is just part of the attraction.
