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Henry Norman finds out more about chef Andrew Thwaites’ delicious Ghanaian Akwaaba concept, which recently won Lexington Catering’s annual Casual Dining Competition...

“The idea and the inspiration came from my grandmother who cooked for schools. I learned from her and that’s what I grew up with.

“I’ve been in contract catering for 28 years now. You always see Indian, Caribbean, Italian and so on on menus, so I thought, ‘Why don’t I bring the authentic African experience?’”

Lexington Catering chef manager Andrew Thwaites is explaining how his Ghanaian upbringing inspired his ultra-authentic Akwaaba street food offer. The wholistic concept, which means ‘you are warmly welcome’ in Thwaites’ native tongue, was victorious at the caterer’s recent Casual Dining Competition.

The annual event is open to the company’s business and industry and Lexington Independents sites. Each team is tasked with creating a new casual dining/street food pop-up concept that can be implemented at their own site or across the wider business.

“Coming out of Covid, we wanted to set up a team event,” explains Daniel Rampat, group new business and innovation chef for Lexington. “We wanted to really engage with our teams, getting them to come up with different ideas and food concepts, as well as marketing ones. It’s about how the teams look and how the concepts come to life.”

To this end, each entrant was tasked with creating a whole campaign to go with their new food offer. “They had to show how their marketing would look,” continues Rampat. “They were also tasked with designing the uniforms and how the stand would look.

“It’s about helping people to develop their careers and go on a journey with us. It could be that someone wants to work in marketing, then the marketing team can see what they can come up with.”

In total, 31 teams made up of 186 people from across the Lexington business entered the competition. Of those, 19 teams were shortlisted to showcase their concepts with eight of them making it to the final. Some 240 clients and guests attended and sampled the food concepts, then voted for their favourite brand, which accounted for 30% of the final score. The other 70% was decided on by an impressive panel of expert judges, which included Stevie Reece, the ex Lexington executive chef, street food entrepreneur and co-founder of Mr Pigstuff, and Dhruv Baker, the former MasterChef winner and co-founder of Tempus.

When asked why he thinks his team prevailed on the day, Thwaites recalls: “What I think really stood out was the combination of tastes. The authenticity and the tastes were so different.

“It was the energy and the vibrancy,” echoes Rampat. “The food just tasted amazing and it’s the kind of food that we haven’t tasted before. Really unusual flavours, different spices, that’s what jumps out at you straight away.

“Also, it was the vibrancy of the team on the night. They were so engaging and they just put so much effort into it.”
They all embraced Thwaites’ idea, which was to showcase the core spirit of Ghanaian hospitality. From low and slow open-fire cooking methods, using tropical produce, to West African-patterned outfits hand-stitched by a team member’s aunt, the concept is truly authentic.

The food itself includes a fragrant waakye from North Ghana and a rich vegetarian staple of Akan cuisine known as kontomire. “The suya chicken skewers are very traditional and they come with a nice heritage tomato salad and fried yams, which is really tasty,” explains Thwaites. “I also included goat meat with rice and peas, but done really authentically.

“In my country we have spaghetti as well, which we mix with a bit of the oil from the cooked meat and fried plantain. We have that combination and then we add shito, which is a chilli sauce.

“You can taste the whole combination, the whole journey, on one plate. So you can’t just say, ‘I don’t like that’.”

The main prize for Thwaites and his team is that Akwaaba will now be introduced across the Lexington business. “A lot of units have booked the concept and everyone who has tried it, loves it,” he says. “They say it’s a brilliant concept, it’s something different. They try and it and they love it.”

“This is the first launch we are seeing today,” explains Rampat, as we all chat in a staff restaurant for a large financial business in central London. “Next week it’s going into two more sites, then it will be rolled out across all of our sites.”

And this won’t be the only one, as from last year’s competition, an impressive six readymade concepts were rolled out in total. “The idea behind it all is to say, ‘You’ve created it, why don’t you take it out to the business now?’” says Rampat. “We are empowering them, so Andrew will be the only one who is allowed to deliver Akwaaba across the business. That will keep the consistency and the authenticity.

“Their team also came up with a Mauritian/Jamaican mash-up and they will be delivering that across our sites . It’s not just about the food, it’s about all the back-ups props to go with it too.”

Rampat is clearly confident that Akwaaba is perfectly on-trend to be a huge success going forward. “It's going to be so popular,” he says. “Black History Month is almost upon us and it’s been so popular. They could have booked it out four times over. Everyone is looking for something different and West African is really on-trend right now.”

Thwaites certainly agrees, and he strongly believes that chefs should be exploring not just the cuisine from his home country, but from the continent as a whole too. “One thing that I would advise other caterers to do is to encourage their African chefs to come up with ideas. This is Ghanaian, but they might have Nigerian or Senegalese chefs.

“When people talk about African food, they know more about the Mediterranean side of Egypt, the tagines and so on, but you don’t see many other types on menus. That would be a great area to explore.”

Following his impressive success, I ask the Thwaites if we he will be returning to Lexington’s Casual Dining Competition again next year, as he is clearly so passionate about promoting the delicious cuisine that was passed down to him by his grandmother all those years ago. “I won’t do any more competing because I hate to compete and lose,” he laughs “I want to win! And I don’t think it would be fair for me to win twice in a row.”

But this doesn’t mean he’ll be depriving the competition of all of his knowledge, enthusiasm and skill, as he altruistically adds: “I’ll coach other, younger people to enter next time.”

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