Grace’s African Restaurant – 4409 N Broadway Street – Uptown – ***
“Are you lost? Do you need directions?”
Not the greeting you expect when walking into a restaurant, but thus began my first experience with West African cuisine. After a two week period when at least three separate cab drivers informed me that Grace African Restaurant was THE spot for Ghanaian food in Chicago, my ladyfriend and I decided to hop on the the 36 bus north for a little culinary adventure on a Sunday night.
Most times I wander into a new restaurant, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what to expect. If I haven’t tried it before, I’ve usually eaten at a few similar joints, read a good writeup somewhere on the web, or at least scoped out the menu and planned my order. However, due to a significant language barrier — a mix of heavy accents on my drivers’ parts and a full Saturday night’s worth of adult beverages on mine — I wasn’t even able to get any hints about which flavors and dishes are the cornerstones of a Ghanaian kitchen, prior to my trip. Despite this, I was excited to try something new and decidedly different.
When we poked our heads in around 8PM, it took a moment to sort through the mutual confusion of us not being totally sure the place was open (there were about 15 people hanging out, with no one looking like they were eating or working) and the staff thinking that we were two lost tourists. Once we made it clear that, yes, we were in fact there with the intention of eating dinner, someone emerged from the kitchen and pulled a tiny table out of a corner, and set it up near the area where a band would very, very slowly continue to set up for the duration of our meal (we suspect that they may actually have been waiting for us to leave).
Choosing what to order was another experience in and of itself. Grace’s menu features a whopping eight dishes, none of which include prices (although we were pretty confident nothing was going to break the bank). One other quirk of the menu is that item descriptions offer only vague promises that they’ll be served with “meat” or “fish.” In general, I’m all for whatever type of meat or fish is put on my plate, so I decided to opt for the Waakye with meat AND fish, and hope for the best. My date went with Fried Plantains and Red Beans (also with “meat” and “fish”).
Our dishes arrived pretty quickly, and my initial reaction was that Waakye seems to be a hodgepodge of whatever is available in the kitchen. My plate featured noodles, onion, avocado, diced tomato, a hard-boiled egg, a piece of fish, and a mixture of beans, rice, and ground beef. Although the fish was pretty dry, the meat/beans/rice mixture was flavorful with a nice touch of heat, which was balanced well by the cool avocado slices.
Though my date’s chicken and fish were also overcooked, the sweet plantains were delicious, as were the mildly spiced red beans and rice which
accompanied it. Once again we were a bit confounded by assortment of other items on the plate (more onion, hard boiled egg, and avocado slices), and we weren’t sure which portions of the plate were meant to be combined. Being the barbarian that I am, I chose the path of mixing everything together, while my more civilized better half worked on her entree in sections.
After wrapping up our meal, we asked for our check, only to have our server think to himself for a moment before deciding that we should pay “about 25 dollars.” I’m not sure if this is an official price that includes tax, or if he just bases the cost of your meal on how much he likes the cut of your jib, but it’s totally not bad for two generously sized entrees and a refreshing Malta Guinness (a non-alcoholic malt beverage imported from Africa). Not wanting to use a credit card in a place that doesn’t seem to provide receipts, I handed him $30 and off we went.
Overall, Ghanaian isn’t close to usurping Ethiopian as my favorite African cuisine, but I’m fully planning to hit Grace up again in the future. If you’re interested in giving Grace a shot, but don’t want to pay full price, be sure to check out Restaurant.com – where you can currently get a $25 gift certificate to Grace for $10.
