One Ghanaian Chef Is Placing New African Cuisine on the Global Map
Selassie Atadika is hoping her work will demonstrate the vastness of Africa’s gastronomy to a wider audience
Selassie Atadika vividly recalls a pivotal moment when she was around six years old, eyeing a pretty dress in a department store. Due to the political instability at the time, her family had newly relocated from Accra, Ghana, to the Hudson Valley, north of New York City. “I said, ‘Mommy, one day can I have a dress like that?’ At the time we were doing hand-me-downs, and it was not easy,” she says. “My mom cried. It was something she could have easily bought in Ghana, and now she could no longer do.”
Having left behind a comfortable lifestyle and the cushion of an extensive network of family and friends in Accra, Atadika and her family were immigrants in an unfamiliar landscape and she and her two siblings were one of a few Black African kids in the neighborhood. “Financially, our family started from zero, but my parents chose to live in an area with a fantastic public school system to give us a solid foundation,” she says. “Westchester was not particularly diverse and we stuck out like a sore thumb, so I think we had some of those growing pains.”
