The African restaurants springing up in Hong Kong

time," the barber in Mirador Mansions says, shaking his head, as I ask for help. "You'll never get into those places. You're not African."

That was the rumour going around about Kowloon's little-known African restaurants, and perhaps scenarios like this were the reason they have been under wraps for so long. For while Hong Kong is welcoming Ghanaians, Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans in droves, the recipes that crossed continents with them remain off the menu for most Hongkongers.

The 2011 census made it tricky to pinpoint the exact number of Africans in Hong Kong - they fell into the "other" category. But Professor Adams Bodomo, formerly associate professor of African Studies at the University of Hong Kong, estimates the city's African population to be about 30,000.

And they must be eating somewhere.

So one rainy Tuesday evening I enter the infamous hotbed of hostels and jungle of jalfrezis that is Chungking Mansions, on Nathan Road, where the African population lives cheek by jowl with their Indian neighbours.

On the first floor next to Gujrat Int'l Hair Cuts, I hit the jackpot with a humble West African restaurant called Kwality. While its flashing sign reads South Indian Food, unmistakable is the big group of Africans chowing down outside.

At Kwality, there is no menu. To order we holler "ma brother" to the server who gives a rundown of the day's dishes. With no questions asked, the Togan chef serves up an egusi soup - a protein-rich, couscous-like melon seed with spinach, spicy tomato chicken and beef stews, and fried plantain with waakye, a Ghanaian special made with rice and kidney beans. It's all soaked up with a thick, white fufu - a starchy filler from West Africa, made by boiling cassava and pounding it into a dough-like consistency.