Asempe Kitchen brings West African food to Ithaca

It was Kuukua Yomekpe’s longtime dream to bring her own spin on traditional West African cuisine to a brick-and-mortar location in Ithaca. After years of serving her food at local farmers markets, Yomekpe now has that brick-and-mortar location on West Green Street in downtown Ithaca, where she currently welcomes patrons in for dinner.

Asempe Kitchen’s current hours are Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m., with the goal of also being open on Mondays by the end of the month.

The restaurant seats a maximum of 24, and Yomekpe envisions turning over the dining room once per night, for a total of around 48 diners per evening. In the future, she would love to relocate to a larger space.

Most of the ingredients are items one can find at the local grocery store. “We just cook it differently,” Yomekpe said.

The rice has its own simple flavor, seasoned with saffron, oregano and salt, and Yomekpe said she has regulars who stop in for rice, plantains and sobolo, a West African drink made out of hibiscus, cloves, ginger and cane sugar. “It’s got a little kick in the back,” she said.

Cooking in Ghana involves utilizing all parts of the plants and animals used. The traditional food Yomekpe grew up with is almost always animal-based, but seeing her vegetarian and vegan sisters pick meat out of traditional dishes inspired Yomekpe to cook vegetarian food that they could enjoy.

“It’s really about access,” Yomekpe said. “You can add meat to anything, but you can’t take it out for the vegetarians and vegans.”

Her favorite food is okra, though she cooks it differently for her customers than she would cook it for herself because she has found that Americans generally do not enjoy the sticky quality it can have when cooked a certain way.

She said the most popular menu item is the peanut stew, which is almost like curry. It is made with peanut paste blended with water and tomato paste and stewed with ginger, garlic and onions.

Originally from Ghana, West Africa, Yomekpe moved to Ithaca in 1996. Her mother moved to the United States when Yomekpe was four years old, and Yomekpe and her sister were raised by their grandmother and a caregiver named Auntie Mercy.  

“Auntie Mercy was very open and allowed us to experiment with food and cooking and trying new things, so that’s the kind of tradition I came from,” Yomekpe said. “It’s a very communal tradition.”

When Yomekpe first moved to the U.S., she lived in Ohio because her uncle was getting his PhD from Ohio State University at the time.

Yomekpe has since lived in California, Indiana and Massachusetts, as well as Ohio. She earned masters degrees in English Literature and Pastoral Counseling from Pacific School of Religion in Berkley, California.

She has held positions working with students at several institutions of higher education, with cooking for people a part of her life the entire time.

“As I was going along, though, I’ve always been cooking for people — hosting cooking classes at my house or my apartment at the residence hall — so it’s just been a progression of taking that to the next level.”

A professor friend inspired Yomekpe to completely move in the direction of starting her own restaurant.  “She said, ‘Your food is amazing; it tastes great. Have you considered doing it full time or even just joining an incubator program or something?’ That pushed me,” she said. “It was probably 12 years ago, and I didn’t realize that dream until eight years ago, when I opened Asempe Kitchen in Ohio, and it was a success in a very small way.”

She moved to upstate New York for a position at Wells College, which turned out to be not for her.

The “sort of invisible labor of working at a predominately white institution” felt like an overwhelming responsibility at times. People of color gravitated toward her because she was one of the few Black faculty or staff members on campus, and therefore she ended up taking on a lot of additional responsibility that did not fall within her job description, Yomekpe said. She worked for a time at Le Moyne College in Syracuse and ended up leaving that position during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was then that she decided to pick up her culinary dreams, and Ithaca seemed like the perfect backdrop for a new start.

“Ithaca feels more receptive, more curious, and my goal is to have people really just be interested in another culture,” Yomekpe said.

She applied to both the Trumansburg and Ithaca farmers markets and was pleasantly surprised to be accepted by both.

“I think I struggle with a lot of self-doubt and imposter syndrome,” Yomekpe said.

After two years of cooking in a Cornell Cooperative Extension kitchen and serving her food at farmers markets and festivals, Yomekpe turned her sights toward opening her own restaurant, eventually landing on the former NorthFolk restaurant near Press Bay Alley.

Yomekpe pooled all of her resources, ready to take on the task of renovating the space, but when faced with the purchase of a $13,000 oven, she knew she needed more money. She applied for a loan and, again, was surprised to hear that her efforts would pay off.

“I got it,” she said. “I was very surprised that somebody actually believes in the dream, so it was good to be able to have that information, that there were people interested in seeing me succeed, and they were wonderful.”

Pursuit, which granted the loan, set Yomekpe up with a loan advisor, whom she meets with once a week to discuss cash flow and consult on staffing and hiring.

Asempe Kitchen opened just a couple of weeks ago, and Yomekpe said the restaurant’s recent ribbon cutting was emotional for her. About 40 people stopped in to give the chef their best wishes.

Currently, Yomekpe has two staff members, who work one night per week, and one prep cook, but she is looking to hire two more employees to do front-of-house work.

She said she is not ready to hand over cooking duties to anyone else just yet.

“People come to see me and eat my food, so teaching the recipes to someone else and letting it go — it just feels really scary right now,” Yomekpe said.

She said that her partner of six years, Sherron Brown, has been her biggest supporter through the process of growing her culinary presence in Ithaca and opening Asempe, adding, “I feel like if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be dreaming this big.”

If she could describe Asempe’s atmosphere in one word, it would be “warmth.”

“And I think,” she said, “most of the people who have come here have felt that.”