#203: World Cup City - Ghana 🇬🇭

Day 37: My Waterloo

Jul 07, 2026

Welcome to an ongoing Brussels Notes series exploring the 48 participating countries of the 2026 World Cup, without leaving Brussels. Read the explainer, check out the other entries, and then subscribe.

Adom Enterprises, Chau. de Louvain 155, 1210 Saint-Josse-ten-Noode

If yesterday’s dispatch from Algeria flirted with disaster, then today’s foray into Ghana lunges two-footed into failure. Finally, 37 countries in, I ran out of energy and willpower. I did not succeed in eating, drinking, or even really experiencing Ghanaian food culture, despite it being right there in front of me.

There is a small Ghanaian shop in St-Josse, just off the commune’s main square as the Leuvensesteenweg begins to climb up and out of the valley towards Schaarbeek. It’s a pretty unassuming place from the outside, wedged between Coiffeur Classic and K&A Beauty Studio. There is no name on the dusty window to tell you that this is Adom Enterprises, nor any indication that as well as it being a shop specialising in Ghanaian and West African groceries, there is also a restaurant on the premises serving kenkey, tilapia, jollof, and other dishes from the region. There is only a flag of faded red, yellow and green stripes with the black star in the centre, hanging in the window alongside a carved wooden figurine.

I stand on the footpath opposite the shop for several minutes, considering my options. I am acutely conscious how conspicuous I must look, with my furtive glances up and down the street and then across the road and typing quickly into my phone’s notes app. I do not, as you will have seen above, take a photograph. I do not want to give anyone else who might be passing by the impression that I am surveilling the location. I knew this would happen; it’s why I left Ghana almost to the very end. I am not sure if there is another entry in this exercise which contained the potential to make me feel more out of place than this little shop.

In the days before my visit to St-Josse I’d watched a short reel from Roger Dushime, the Belgian food content creator/documentarian/cook whose activism has introduced me to a new world of African cooking. It was about the culture shock a person might experience when going to eat at a restaurant from a culture that isn’t one’s own, or with which you are not overly familiar. How knowing - or not knowing - the codes and cultural norms is crucial to our experience of hospitality from another culture. And standing there on the footpath, I knew with certainty I did not have sufficient knowledge of the codes required for me to have an enjoyable or enriching experience at Adom.

But I was not just going to abandon the enterprise; after all, there was still a newsletter to be written. So I determined that, instead of my original plan of going in and sitting down for lunch, I would make a more strategic intervention, get in and get out quickly, for a bottle of Ghanaian beer or soft drink. So I steeled myself, walked off the pavement and across the street, and snuck in through the front door between a cluster of shoppers loitering by the entrance and large drooping sacks of grain piled up opposite them by the doorway.

The light in the shop was dusky after the bright noonday sun outside, and someone somewhere was cooking rich, smoky, fatty meat of some sort. The shop was narrow and the shelves stacked all the way up to a high ceiling, bearing over me as I made my way to the back of the small room. I had spotted there was some sort of cabinet with LED light strips and assumed that was their fridge, and where they kept their drinks. It was not. It was a freezer, and all I could see in it were large hunks of frozen meat and piles of frozen smoked dead-eyed fish staring back out at me. Next to the freezers a woman was standing with one hand on her hip and the other holding a phone up to her ear, into which she was shouting rapidly. There was loud music playing and I could make out nothing of what she was saying. Next to her was a large black door that I could not see through, but which I took to be the entrance to the restaurant. But I didn’t go and find out. In fact, I barely looked around me at all. I was overwhelmed, my senses overloaded. I turned around and fled, out the door and back into the bright outdoors.

I berated myself as I walked up the street to the metro at Madou; why did I panic? The place didn’t look all that intimidating; the google reviews of the food were quite positive. Look, I told myself, I can always come back, when it’s quieter and I’m more in the mood.

I never was, and I never did. Sorry, Ghana.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about the time when there was a less happy ending.

Thanks for reading - I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe newsletter about life in Brussels. If you like it and you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here!