Eric Adjepong's Elmina brings Ghana’s beachfront cuisine to D.C.
"Elmina means treasure. I want to celebrate that," says the Top Chef alum.
“Akwaaba,” our waitress said with a warm smile as we sat in the dimly lit upstairs dining room at Elmina, a new contemporary Ghanaian restaurant helmed by celebrity chef Eric Adjepong. Akwaaba is the Ghanaian word for “welcome.”
As she filled our water cups, a familiar highlife song that I’ve known the words to since childhood softly wafted down from the speakers. Even though it was pretty early on opening night, Elmina was already buzzing with anticipation as guests picked out dishes conceived by the Top Chef alum.
“We are fans of Top Chef, two of my favorite seasons had Chef Eric,” one diner told me. “His emotion came out in his love for West African cuisine,” added her husband, “But you never get to taste it, so we’re always on the lookout for jumping into the show and tasting what they feel passionate about.”
“I’m very, very, very confident that people will pick up exactly what we’re doing here,” says Adjepong in an interview with The 51st about Elmina, which sits on 14th St NW — just north of the U Street Corridor. “The music is going to play a huge part of that. We’re gonna’ play the afrobeats, the highlife – we got it all.”
As a first-generation Ghanaian-American who was born and raised in New York City, Adjepong hopes his restaurant closes the gap between the two cultures; he promises to blend sensory, taste, and sound experiences throughout the two-level, five-dining room restaurant.
The opening menu is a four-course tasting experience for $105 per person. Guests choose four of the courses and a fifth (or sixth) is chef’s choice. The third course dishes are larger and intended to be shared for every two people.
Each course has about four options. Among the first course options are a curried corn bisque and hamachi crudo which was light, fresh, and a bit tangy. Second courses include stewed black-eyed peas and wagyu short rib. For our third course, we dove into the jollof duck pot. The duck is tender and juicy with a hint of sweetness which complemented the savory, slight crisp of the jollof rice. Another popular third course dish on opening night was the whole grilled lobster. And for dessert, choose from a donut hole known as bofrot served with Milo-based gelato, mango pudding, or a malva pudding cake—commonly served in South Africa.
Adjepong and José Andrés alum, Daniel Grajewski, collaborated on the beverage program. The wine list features several selections from South Africa such as chardonnay from the Western Cape and a honey bunch wine from the town of Stellenbosch. The cocktails are standard fare – among which you’ll find a daiquiri, a martini, a margarita, and a couple of non-alcoholic options.
Adjepong has had significant success across food-focused reality TV since his breakout appearance on Season 16 of Top Chef, including a subsequent all-stars season and appearances on Beat Bobby Flay and Guy Fieri’s Tournament of Champions. He now hosts Wildcard on Food Network, but Elmina marks his first standalone venture – and the culmination of a childhood dream.
“Every expectation that I had as a child is being fulfilled times 10. I’ve been blessed,” he says.
By the time Adjepong joined Top Chef, D.C. was home. He moved to the area six years ago and during his tenure on the show, he felt a lot of support from the city. D.C. just made sense for his first restaurant; he started his family here, and his siblings also live nearby. The restaurant takes its name from a small beach town along the coast of Ghana, which has one of the most famous slave castles still standing in West Africa — but Adjepong hopes the name is less a reminder of its dark history and more a celebration of the vast culture represented by the community.
“Elmina is absolutely beautiful in the diversity and the amount of people that come from different tribes in Ghana,” he said, “Elmina means treasure. I want to celebrate that; and eradicate the idea that [we are] coming from something negative when there’s another side of that coin that is absolutely beautiful.”
Elmina’s menu features some common Ghanaian dishes with a bit of a modern twist. For example, Adjepong replaces the canned tuna typically found in Ghanaian-style salads with ahi tuna. Similarly, octopus and shrimp are a fresh addition to the banga stew.
Adjepong is also using the menu to help change the perception of fine dining. For example, the menu includes fufu. Ghanaian fufu is a mix of root vegetables like potatoes, plantains, and yams that are laboriously pounded and kneaded into a smooth, round, doughy ball typically bathed in a meaty soup. It can be found in many restaurants in Ghana, but often not on contemporary dining menus in the West. But Adjepong disagrees with that precedent.
“There’s so much technique that goes into making fufu … I think a lot of people have the idea that fine dining comes from Italian chefs, French chefs, or somewhere European — and that is absolutely not the case. We're here to eradicate that as much as possible.”
As is customary in Ghana, Elmina’s fufu is preceded by a large bowl of soapy warm water to wash your hands, as it’s traditionally eaten without dining utensils.
Each room in the restaurant is dedicated to a specific commodity or feature of Ghana’s economy – a tobacco room, a cotton room, a timber room, a sugar cane room, and an indigo room representing the Atlantic ocean, which brushes against Ghana’s beachside shores.
