When FUFU n’ Sauce chef/founder Adjo Honsou started cooking for people in 2018, she thought it would be nothing more than a series of small dinner parties aimed at introducing her West African culinary traditions to close friends. Now, she has a successful food truck, a new brick-and-mortar restaurant, and a PBS Great American Recipe win all under her belt—and no plans to slow down on her quest to use food as a way to create community.
You describe FUFU n’ Sauce as being a culmination of coming to the United States from Togo when you were 14 years old. Tell us about that. Migrating with my parents to St. Louis at the age of 14, I had all of these experiences of seeing how food was such a big part of culture where I came from, but here, it was very much an afterthought. That was just my perspective from being foreign born; I’m sure if someone born in America came to Togo and did not see the things that were familiar to them, they would feel the same way. When you are forced to assimilate, it does something to you that you don’t even realize at the time; 14- and 15-year-old me didn’t know why it didn’t feel like home and why I didn’t feel like I belonged. I didn’t speak the language, but I didn’t realize that all of the other nourishing aspects of culture were in my brain and contributing to the fact that this just didn’t feel like home.
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When did you realize that food was a big part of that disconnection you felt? When I moved to America, cooking for me at first wasn’t about reconnecting to a source. My mom and I had moved here, and she was working all the time—rightfully so, because we were uprooted into a new place and needed money. I wanted to make food for us to help out so that when my mom came home she didn’t have to cook. It wasn’t until I started cooking that I began remembering all of these moments, and that is when I truly started missing home. It was about two or three years after we moved here, and I started feeling that this is not my way of life… Cooking made me feel connected to my grandma. I started to find all the ingredients for the foods we used to make; that was a high-stress activity, trying to find ingredients for foods not cooked in the region and find substitutes to make things as close as they could be to what she made. For me, it wasn’t about the end product but more that I needed the space to smell just like it did in her house. That smell made me feel her presence, like if I closed my eyes I was back in her kitchen.
Was your grandmother’s house where you learned to cook? Being an African child and girl born in Togo, cooking is your indoctrination: You don’t need to love it, but you are going to do it because who is going to do it for you? Who is going to feed your kids if you don’t feed yourself? In Togo, it’s rare to find women who do not cook; it’s almost culturally taboo. It truly is indoctrination. You grow up in the kitchen with your aunties, and as long as you can do something, you are doing something. If you’re not big enough to pound fufu you will pluck cassava leaves. For a girl in my country, the kitchen is as natural as drinking water. I grew up cooking with my grandma because my grandparents raised me from the age of four or five. My mom lived in the city, and I lived in a village. It was very rural, and we grew everything we ate except for beef and raised our own chickens and goats. Everything was done by the family, so if grandma came back from the market, you dropped what you were doing because it was time to cook. You learn by watching, and then you get to the age where you are trusted to start doing small basics. Eventually you are tasked with the responsibility of nurturing your family, and that is both a big title and responsibility and is also very joyous because everyone is entrusting you to feed them. It’s an honor.
If the transition to a new country was difficult, the transition to a new high school must have also been quite challenging. What was that like? In high school, people would ask what I was eating, not from a place of curiosity but from a place of judgment. It was as if the food that was not familiar was approached with shame. And it was like that for other immigrants, too. Whether someone is African, Asian, or Latin American, the system is not made with them in mind, so it always felt like we were dealing with an imbalance of access to food. We underestimate how much people want to feel like they belong somewhere, and related to that, we underestimate how that lack of belonging affects morale and mental capacity in those spaces.
Did that experience apply to college and even the corporate world after graduation? That scenario was repeated in college and the corporate world. I studied bioscience at Old Dominion University in Virginia, and when I came back from school, I started an entry-level position in that field. I found that biotech campuses are some of richest campuses in terms of money, but no thought is put into how to better serve all these people of diverse communities on these campuses who are facilitating the growth of this company. That became a recurring theme wherever I went in the corporate world, and it got to the point where I could not ignore that any longer.
How did that experience inspire FUFU n’ Sauce? I went to Old Dominion University in Virginia to study bioscience, and when I moved back from college and had my daughter, I began really thinking about community. I remember growing up in Togo as part of a community where everyone took care of one another, [but here] I’d have to find a sitter for everything, and I realized how much of an isolationist system we have. It’s not built to be a community, and you have to pay for everything when it comes to raising kids. We just don’t have that infrastructure, so it is up to us as individuals to understand the value of community and how we can build that. That became my mission. I started FUFU n’ Chat at first for the purely selfish reason of needing to make friends and form a community. I knew how to cook, so I started having dinner parties once a month where I’d make African food and invite over people, telling them to bring the booze and leave their expectations at the door. I started it with six women in 2018, and by 2024, it had grown to 167 people.
How did that groundwork become FUFU n’ Sauce? [FUFU n’ Chat] got so big that I could not feed people for free anymore, and I needed to transition it into something else. Through the monthly events, I was able to meet incredible people and made some genuine friends and business connections. The experience opened my brain to the idea that people truly want food to not just be this thing that you shove into your mouth but a connection to where it is coming from and an understanding of the value of that community and culture. FUFU n’ Chat showed me that—while maybe African food is not what the mainstream is talking about—the community wants it. I decided to do a proof of concept, so I started with a pop-up tent and then eventually grew into a food truck.
How did you get the opportunity to compete on—and ultimately win—PBS’ The Great American Recipe? It’s a funny story. I was going through FUFU n’ Sauce’s DMs and got one from someone saying that they were casting for a PBS show, that they thought I’d be great, and to let them know if I was interested. The first thoughts that went through my head were that it was a scam. I never usually pay attention to those types of messages, but a little voice told me to respond and see what they had to say. We ended up chatting, and I still did not believe it was actually happening until they bought the plane tickets for me to go to Nashville. It just felt too good to be true. Apparently, they comb different regions of the country for casting; when they looked at St. Louis, one of the biggest things that came up was the Festival of Nations. They saw my food truck and it just went from there.
What was that experience like? Ending up on the show and seeing all these world-renowned judges be pleasantly surprised about my food was a great experience. They kept asking me how I did everything, and I would always say that my grandmother taught me. I kept thinking that I am a home cook, and I do this because I like nurturing my family. Seeing them appreciate that tradition passed down from generations and now to me—things they maybe have never made or never had—was something I cannot forget. I’d had this imposter syndrome for so long, but being on the show made me step into this call I have been tasked with and bring my full self into the world. After that win, my focus became how I could do this full-time. It was the validation I needed to realize that just because no one gave me a degree in cooking doesn’t mean it’s not good or that I don’t deserve a seat at the table. That’s when FUFU n’ Sauce got its second sail, and there was no stopping it.
How would you describe FUFU n’ Sauce to newcomers? FUFU n’ Sauce is truly an experience, whether that is at the food truck or the restaurant where you experience the full shebang. I am a very intentional person, so if I’m not going to do something well, I don’t do it. I don’t want to waste this community’s time because St. Louis deserves so much. I show up every day and give it my all because it is that important to me. The number one comment we get at our brick-and-mortar is about the vibes. They are so amazing, and it is by design. You are surrounded by things that curate what we are about, whether that is a print on the wall that symbolizes community and is connected to culture, or West African art, or wooden beads or even us in the back pounding fufu. These are all cultural representations. I believe art carries the energy of the maker and of the people it is about, so when you walk into FUFU n’ Sauce, that is what you feel. All of your senses are prewarning you about what you are about to experience.
As for the food, everything is sourced fresh, cut fresh, blended fresh—nothing is over-preserved so you can truly taste the love and courage that goes into it. Someone once told me that it hugs you from the inside. These recipes were not my grandmother’s; they were her grandmother’s before her and back generations and centuries. Now I am in possession of them, so it is a point of pride and joy for me. Were it not, I would not have quit my career job to do this. People think of African food as this big beast, but it’s interesting to me how food migrates with culture. We pound fufu, but if we had potatoes in West Africa, we’d be making mashed potatoes. They are not all that different. Don’t be afraid to come in and ask questions. That’s why we give free samples to people. It’s not about money. It’s about connecting you to us and our culture.
Have you thought about what comes next? We are on target to have three locations by 2030 and franchises by 2034. That’s the goal and now we are trying to access as many people as we can to show them how we can change the narrative and the culture of the ethnic food space. It’s a 79 billion dollar industry, and West African food is nowhere to be seen. We really have to change that. And I know we can. When you do what you do with conviction and service in mind, the right people will come when you least expect it and when you need it the most. I am very much proof of that.
