CityView Magazine - Fayetteville, NC
Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/677112
28 | May/June 2016 in 2009, helps with waiting tables. "When we realized this was going to be a family business, we said we will need all the help that we can." Isabella appreciates her family. "ere's nothing like having family around you, helping. I wish I could have everybody. Part of them are still back in Ghana. We are scattered all over, but it's fulfilling." In 2001, Isabella and Tetteh, her husband, moved from Chicago to Fay- etteville, making Fort Bragg their First Duty Station. "It was some time in April," Isabella remembers, "and Chicago was cold, and here it was so beautiful and I said, 'Wow, now I am not going back to any big city.'" Isabella herself hails from Ghana, the country she refers to as her "home- home," a nation on Africa's Gulf of Guinea. She came to the United States in 1997. Isabella never had any ideas to open a restaurant. Back in Ghana, she curated art for the Golden Tulip Hotel, featur- ing art from students at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). "Abstract, acrylic, you name it, wa- tercolor, everything." While living in Chicago, she worked at the DuSable Museum of African American History, which earned Smith- sonian Affiliation status earlier this year, and the Chicago Academy of Sciences Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. "I appreciate art and I appreciate na- ture. I'm not an actress or anything, but there's something about it. Just because you can't do it doesn't mean you can't appreciate it. We have to appreciate one another." Art followed her everywhere. Isa- bella met Tetteh in Chicago, aer the two were introduced through a friend of their pastor. Later, they married and moved to Fayetteville. e move wasn't difficult for Isabella, partly due to the milder weather but she also began to find her community. She volunteered with Umoja Group, a Fay- etteville-based non-profit that works to promote education, culture and the positive history of Africans, African Empanadas filled with savory seasoned chicken are served here with their most popular Tusker beer.