Gold Coast Ghal brings West African food to Seattle’s South Lake Union

While the Seattle area is known for its East African cuisine, and has enough Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Somali restaurants to fill you with sambusa and injera for the ages, opportunities to explore the cuisines of West Africa are lacking.

But for the rest of the summer, the Gold Coast Ghal Kitchen pop-up restaurant serves Ghanaian and Liberian cuisine from the South Lake Union’s Gold Bar, bringing meat pies, grilled suya skewers, and rice bowls with chicken stew to central Seattle.

Born in Liberia and raised in Ghana, entrepreneur Tina Fahnbulleh started Gold Coast Ghal when she moved to Seattle five years ago and saw the lack of food in her part of the world. She started cooking the flavors and spices she remembered from home, first for friends, then for an ever-growing group of Seattle moldings with similar okro soups, fufu, and shito-shaped holes in their hearts in public pop-ups. It eventually became Gold Coast Ghal Kitchen, a catering company that offered weekly deliveries of soups, stews, and snacks during much of the pandemic.

Now she regularly prepares a small menu with plantains, pies and stews from 3 to 10 p.m. in the Gold Bar on Sundays and Mondays from 3 to 10 p.m. – and uses the opportunity to introduce even more people in Seattle to the spicy pepper sauces and the savory skewers, that she loves and misses from her home region.