Mövenpick Hotel, Sankofa Restaurant
Mövenpick the ice cream, meet Mövenpick the hotel. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that Mövenpick, a brand I thought was only associated with expensive ice cream, also ran a hotel chain. My mind was awash with fanciful images of rooms made of ice cream and beds made of waffle cones. Oh just imagine how delicious that hotel would be!
Alas, the new Mövenpick in Accra isn’t made of ice cream, but it is still rather fancy looking. Perched on the outskirts of the central business district, the hotel takes up a rather imposing amount of land with an elongated hotel and office building. It looks like it has every convenience you’d expect from a 5 star hotel (I’m unfortunately not staying there), but most importantly, it has a very nice looking restaurant.
The restaurant has an a la carte menu, with the option of a self-service salad bar, and more importantly, they specialize in steak. I’ve never been so excited to see steak on a menu; Ghanaians are not big beef eaters, with chicken being the favoured meat. It is hideously expensive by local standards, and the restaurant is primarily filled with businessmen and expats staying at the hotel.
I Ate
I went the South African sourced Rib Eye, for $48 Ghana Cedi ($25 AUD) with the option of self-serve salad bar for $32 GHS ($17 AUD). The salad bar had a generous selection of salads, and even included a sushi roll section. I ended up making a complete mess of it, and decided to select a combination of non-complimentary salads. I piled my plate with Thai beef salad, corn salad and a ham salad (which unfortunately didn’t just contain ham). The salads were all very good, but the chillies in the Thai beef salad were pretty hot and caused me to hiccup, to the amusement of the rest of the table.
Unlike other restaurants in Ghana, the steak came out quickly. It was cooked to medium, as requested, and it was very tender. I particularly liked the sauce. The side salad was quite good, but the chips were weedy and disappointing.
Although full to the point of exploding, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to eat Mövenpick ice cream in a Mövenpick hotel. So I ordered the banana split for $18 GHS($9.5) which came out with a generous serve of vanilla ice cream. I’ve been craving a good ice cream for weeks, and this one was so good I think I blacked out.
In case anyone else wasn’t yet full, we topped the night off with a fake birthday for one of my colleagues. They ended up bringing out a nautical flare hiding in a piece of black forest cake.
To Conclude
Good western comfort hotel food, and not outrageously priced in comparison to back home. Don’t be put off by the cedi conversion rate.