In Crumlin, a new take on the spice bag

Growing up in Tallaght, Debbie Akinbami got a taste for mashed potatoes at creche. But her mother didn’t buy potatoes, she says, so she tried mashing yams.

“It was different but it was good,” she says. “That was how I started fusing Nigerian flavours and Irish cuisine flavours together.”

Her mum objected to the method, and to the mess Akinbami left in the kitchen, she says, but she couldn’t stop experimenting.

She just loved cooking and was an avid fan of cookery programmes on TV, says Akinbami, standing in the small kitchen of her Afro-fusion takeaway, Aduni, on the ground floor of the The Star Bingo Hall in Crumlin.

That, in a way, is the origin story of her signature dish.

“There is a lot of competition with spice bags,” says Akinbami, as she throws shredded chicken into the deep fryer.

Her take is up there, a hot spice bag infused with extra Nigerian spices, and made with three kinds of chips, using plantain and yam as well as potatoes.

Akinbami was working alone when she first launched Aduni last summer, she says. But, as she drew in customers across Dublin, the team has grown.

An accidental business

Akinbami, who is 25 years old, studied business at the National College of Ireland and was also working as a chef when the Covid-19 lockdowns hit, she says.

At a loose end, she kept cooking and posting about the food.

Friends asked her to cook for them too, unable to find what they wanted in Dublin, she says. “We don’t have enough restaurants, there is a real shortage of African food.”

Word spread. Soon, she had a small catering business in demand for events, parties and weddings.

In April, she signed to take on the takeaway premises at The Star Bingo Hall in Crumlin. She launched Aduni over the summer. Now, she gets orders from all over Dublin, from people from all over the world, she says.

Before she launched Aduni, Akinbami sat down to consider her signature takeaway dish. “How can I infuse African flavours into a spice bag?” she says. “I was just thinking of our staples.”

It came to her in an hour, she says.

First, there’s the mix of chips. She holds up the banana-like plantain. The plantain makes a softer chip that is slightly sweet. The yam makes a chip that is crunchy and harder than the potato, but that softens in the spicy-sweet sauce.

She also uses shredded chicken, onions and peppers as is traditional. The crispy chicken is tender and tasty.

And, she has added a secret blend of spices. “It is very popular,” she says. “The combination of everything blends really well together.”

On the menu

“You wouldn’t believe I used to make this in secondary school,” says Akinbami, as she turns a chunky wrap on a frying pan.

She calls this wrap “the jurrito” – a burrito made with jollof rice.

She invented it one day when, bored of ham and cheese sambos, she grabbed whatever she could find at home to make a burrito. Stuffed in with the jollof rice is chicken, plantain, tomato sauce and slaw.

“Nigerians don’t eat lettuce, everything is a slaw,” she says. “That is our salad.”

The Sunday buffet menu at Aduni includes sausage rolls, jerk chicken and meat pies.

But the sausage rolls have a twist too, says Akinbami.

They’re made with a harder pastry, like a shortcrust pastry, she says. “It’s not puffy, but it’s a spicy sausage instead.”

The vegan option is a honey-bean fritter, blended with onions, pepper, seasoning, slaw and smoked spicy sauce in a bap.

For dessert, the puff puff balls are fluffy, squidgy and moist like the pastry of a high-quality doughnut and coated in icing sugar.

“You can have them plain or spicy and we do ours with Kinder sauce and Biscoff and white chocolate,” she says.

Puff puff can be a savoury starter as well, with chicken for example, she says.

Akinbami plans to launch Aduni on the Just Eat platform in the coming weeks and she seems hopeful and a little nervous.

“Fingerscrossed, I think we will be busy,” she says.