Editor's note
I was scrolling Instagram when I landed on Ify's page.
We had met earlier in the year at the African Creators Summit, where we did a quick backstage interview. I will be honest about the question I was carrying at the time: how does someone who cooks get called a creative?
Going through her page is where it hit me.
Ify's Kitchen is the definition of what happens when cooking becomes a creative practice inside the African creative economy. The framing. The recipe development. The discipline. The business sitting underneath all of it.
So I asked Sam, our managing editor, to find her and ask if she would sit down with us for a special Open Hours.
Her episode is why we call it Open Hours. Watch it and you will see what I mean.
She cooked asun fried rice, and she cooked it for her father
Most people would have reached for asun jollof. It is the popular one. Ify went the other way.
I know asun jollof is more popular. But hey, I don't do anything regular."
The dish carries history for her.
I remember the first time I tried it and my father loved it. When I say loved, I mean loved, loved, loved it. So when he comes to visit, this is the meal I make for him. I hold it very dear to my heart.
That is the tone of the whole afternoon. Precision on the surface, warmth running underneath it.
The lawyer never actually left
Fourteen years at a corporate firm do not wash off. Ify still reviews her own agreements, and she reads them the way she was trained to.
An agreement binds you. It is very important that you look at the fine lines before you sign.
We asked what that protects her from. Her answer belongs on a wall in every creator's office.
It helps me suppress any form of excitement. Even when I am working with the biggest brands in the world, I still go: hey, chill. This is how court cases are born, when you do not take the time to look at what you are doing.
Ify Mogekwu
She has a management team who review deals on her behalf now. She still reads everything they send back, and she still asks questions. The law degree did not become irrelevant when she changed industries because it has become leverage.
The night she knew
Before the twins, before the maternity leave, there was a stretch where she was living two lives at once.
I was being kept awake at night by my passion for creating recipes. I was working morning till night, then at night I would come back to it. I was neither here nor there. And the only way to achieve excellence is to focus on something.
Then the decision made itself.
The exact moment I left was when I went on maternity leave with my twins. I just knew it had to be now or never. So once I went on maternity leave, I did not go back.
She was leaving the known for the unknown, and at the time nobody in Nigeria was doing what she was about to do.
When I started, nobody was sharing food recipes on Instagram. Ify's Kitchen started that.
The mission was never fame. It was access.
The only reason I started Ify's Kitchen was to demystify the art of cooking. You do not have to have gone to any big shot culinary school. You can put nutritious, great food on your table.
Every recipe still passes the same four tests before it goes out. Is it nutritious. Does it taste good. Does it look good. Can anyone actually recreate it.
Ify making a meal during her Open Hours Interview
"Visibility without value is emptiness"
This is where the conversation turned, and it is the reason this issue exists.
Escapemag Issue 15 was built on the idea that attention is the new oil. Ify has been refining hers for a decade, and she has watched plenty of people confuse the raw material for the wealth.
You could be very visible without adding value. Visibility without value is where the danger is.
She kept pressing the same point.
As you are getting all this visibility, what is it doing for you? Is it adding value to you? Is it adding money to your pocket? Is it adding awards to your table?
Then the line we have not stopped thinking about since.
Visibility without value is emptiness. People are chasing trends all over the place. Make sure that as you are trending, you are adding value to yourself and to your audience.
What survives if Instagram disappears
We ask every Open Hours guest the same question. What do you own that survives if social media vanishes overnight. Most people pause. Ify answered it years ago.
I do not leave it at Instagram level.
She has a website with her recipes on it. She has been collecting emails and phone numbers from her community for years, quietly, every time she runs something. And she has products in development that live entirely offline.
If tomorrow Instagram decides we are done, TikTok, YouTube, I hope it never happens. But if it happens, I fall back on my community that I built outside social media. I fall back on my website. And I keep working on my products offline.
That is the difference between a creator and a business, and she crossed it before anybody asked her to.
The version she is building now
"I have left law. I pivoted into creator and storyteller. The next version is to build myself as an entrepreneur. I am moving from just being a creator to owning my own business, my own product line."
She is raising twins while she does it, and she is deliberate about what they see.
"I am letting them know that you can be there for your kids and still follow your dreams."
Her measure for whether something is worth doing runs refreshingly long.
"I am doing things that in maybe fifty years I will be glad I did."
Why we call it Open Hours
Because every so often somebody opens the door and lets you see the actual work. The pot on the fire, the contracts, the reason one dish matters more than the others, the plan for the decade after this one.
Ify on an Open Hours Set
Ify said it best while the rice was still cooking.
"It is easy to say to someone I love you. But with food, it is like putting your heart where your mouth is."
Watch the full film above. Then go and make something.