FUFU n’ Sauce owner Adjo Honsou is serving a market she never envisioned
By Eric Schmid, St. Louis Magazine
The acclaimed chef thought food truck fans would follow her. Instead, she’s cultivating a whole new audience.
When Adjo Honsou decided to take a leap and open a FUFU n’ Sauce restaurant last June, she was sure the people who came to know the brand as a food truck would follow.
But the dynamic purveyor of West African culture and cuisine was surprised to see a different crowd find the small restaurant at the corner of Page Avenue and Midland Boulevard in University City.
“People that are coming to us, it is not largely everybody that we’ve met with the food trucks,” she says. “I thought, ‘Well, we’ve served 35,000-plus meals across St. Louis, so those people know the food. They love the food. They will come find us.’ But it turns out a bulk of people that come to the restaurant are the people that live in U City, the people that are around us.”
It’s been an important experience for Honsou, who won PBS’ The Great American Recipe in 2024 but hadn’t previously owned a restaurant. She previously spent over a decade in scientific roles at bioMérieux and later Pfizer before leaning into her cooking talents. She says seeing who’s coming to her restaurant has helped her better understand the market for her West African cuisine.
“We have people that love coming to the food truck, they love food truck culture, they love picking up a picnic blanket and coming to the park and getting food and having a good time,” she says. “Then we have the crowd that love the food, the experience, the culture, and it doesn’t matter where we are. They’re gonna come.”
She says the FUFU n’ Sauce food truck still goes out to festivals and events, only now Honsou sees it as an “acquisition point.”
“As we’re growing and finding different communities, we always try to do different events as well, just sharing the culture that way,” she says. “Of course, we redirect them back to the brick and mortar.”
Honsou wants to open a second location of the restaurant by next summer. She says she hears from customers who travel from Chesterfield, St. Peters, and St. Charles and are clamoring for more ethnically diverse options closer to home.
Honsou still holds onto her loftier ambition of eventually creating a franchising model where there are FUFU n’ Sauces across the country, in “communities that are beginning to yearn for that diversity [in food] but don’t have it as of now.” But despite the traction she has seen, she still butts up against a challenge common to earlier stage operators: capital to grow can be challenging to secure.
“I’ve been in many, many situations where it’s kind of like, ‘Oh wow, we love what you’re doing, and we think this will work, and we want to support you,’ until it comes to loaning money, and then it’s like you’re left to to figure it out on your own,” she says. “I need more than just you’re doing a great job. ‘You’re doing a good job’ doesn’t pay my bills.”
Having mostly self-financed FUFU n’ Sauce, Honsou knows her limits, and isn’t in a hurry to over extend herself.
“I took all the money I made from being a scientist and some of my savings and started this business,” she says. “As the business started growing, I used some of that money to reinvest in the business.”
As such, she’s keen to make sure her first FUFU n’ Sauce expansion goes into the right space, likely one that looks a lot like the University City location. The eatery has about 1,800 square feet, split evenly between the kitchen and dining space, making it an ideal fast-casual spot.
She’s open to locations further west—or the opposite direction, downtown.
“It all depends on location, square footage, and overhead,” she says. “I’m looking for collaboration, for people that really see what we’re doing in this community, which we’re doing amazing things because of FUFU n’ Sauce.”
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