Eat It, Virginia!

When Chef Ida Mamusu fled Liberia after a coup d'état in 1980, she landed in New York City alone and without a plan. A stranger approached Mamusu, crying at the airport, and took her back to her apartment to help get her on her feet.  After connecting with family in the states, Mamusu made her way to Richmond where she opened businesses to earn money to bring her family over from Africa. It was family, she said, specifically her grandmother, who set her on the path to opening her restaurant Chef Mamusu's Africanne on Main. "When I turned 10 years old, she put an apron on me and gave me a cooking spoon," Mamusu said. "That day was the day that I knew that I was going to be a cook, just the apron and spoon was in my hand, it transformed my whole idea of what I wanted to do in my life." It wasn't long before her father made Mamusu the chef of the house. She was just 13 years old. "I was feeding 11 people, doing the menus, the budget, everything," she said. "I knew that this was it, there wasn't anything els