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The West African flavors of Gold Coast Ghal Kitchen are set to join First Hill in a space filled with memories of home for owner Tina Fahnbulleh.

Gold Coast Ghal Kitchen was started in 2017 with a six-year journey of pop-ups and events by Fahnbulleh toward opening her own restaurant.

“My menu is based on the foods I grew up with,” Fahnbulleh said. “I’ve had to go without them in each place I’ve lived in Seattle and I just wanted a little bit of home with me.”

The new project is coming together and nearly ready to open in the former Boren home of Little Neon Taco, the Monica Dimas concept that succumbed to pandemic pressures in 2021 after three years of business.

Fahnbulleh is proud of her culture. She was born in Liberia and then raised in Ghana before migrating to the States. The name “Gold Coast” comes from Ghana, while it was still a British colony, and “Ghal” is a reference to Fahnbulleh’s full name Tinagirl. She sees it as a way of keeping a piece of herself in the name.

For Fahnbulleh, cooking was not always a passion, but once a chore she had to do.

“I did not cook by choice,” Fahnbulleh said. “I had to help out whoever was cooking, whether it was my grandmother or my older sister. I was in charge of making the rice or whatever the side dish was, and then at about eight, I took over cooking lunch on weekends for our family and then just went from there.”

“There’s a trauma behind me doing this,” Fahnbulleh said. “At some point, I stopped wanting to take my lunch to school because I was being teased by the other kids for having different food.”

Her menu will feature Liberian dishes like potato greens for her grandmother, and Ghanaian foods like waakyè, a hearty rice and black-eyed peas dish.

“I cooked because that’s what I know how to do,” Fahnbulleh said. “So I continued cooking for friends, and family. It’s how I know how to make friends — I just feed people.”

Fahnbulleh started hosting potlucks to meet people when she moved to Seattle. She joined The Collective Seattle, a transplant group for diverse individuals to meet new people and form communities based in the city.

“Through the Collective I started meeting people and hosting dinner parties with friends that I’d made there,” Fahnbulleh said. “Then people started asking me to meal prep for them and that’s how I got started.”

She soon moved on to the pop-up and catering lifestyle, her “side hustle” as Fahnbulleh referred to it. For a time, Gold Coast popped-up out of the kitchen at Gold Bar’s old South Lake Union home. Gold Bar has since relocated to E Olive Way and won’t be that far away from Fahnbulleh.

It wasn’t until restaurants began shutting down in 2020 that Fahnbulleh began to consider her “side hustle” more seriously. Fahnbulleh would create a menu for people to order from and on one day a week, she would prepare and deliver their food.

“It became a personal journey where I had to sit down with myself and think, well Tina, clearly you love doing this if there’s a whole pandemic going on and you’re still risking your life to get your food out there,” Fahnbulleh said. “And that’s when I started pursuing it full-time.”

She spent about a year carefully looking for the location for her restaurant, now moving into the same space once filled by Little Neon Taco.

“I chose First Hill because it’s easily accessible,” Fahnbulleh said. “I wanted a location that was central to Cap Hill, and the ID as well as Central District and Downtown — this space just happened to work out.”

Gold Coast Ghal Kitchen explores her West African roots and honors the countries of the region by incorporating the colors of their flags. Orange, green, and yellow will adorn the restaurant, for the countries of Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, and Liberia.

“I want to represent each of the West African countries so I will weave baskets for our 16 countries, represented in different sizes for each of the nations, the 60 nations of West Africa,” Fahnbulleh said. “I just wanted a piece of all of us in there.”

She is also creating the space to honor her grandmother, the woman who helped her discover her love for cooking. She recalls the smell of coal-filled kitchens and frying fish when her grandma would cook for anywhere from 10 to 20 people for a meal. The kente cloth backrests in the restaurant were picked out together with her grandmother.

“She’s always helped me with what I should make or what I should put on the menu to cook,” Fahnbulleh said. “She’s my go-to, she’s my cookbook.”

The Gold Coast Ghal Kitchen is located at 1011 Boren Ave. Fahnbulleh hopes to open the new project in November. Learn more at goldcoastghal.com.

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