Best Features These 3 Award-Winning Chefs Are Redefining African Food — And Introducing A Whole New Audience To Its Rich And Diverse Flavors

Photo:

Courtesy of Dieuveil Malonga Group

From the aromatic java of the Ethiopian Highlands to the piquant coconut curries of the Swahili Coast, African cuisines are legion and divers — and the world be taking note.

We spoke to three award-winning chefs astir the ingredients, traditions, and places that inspire them.

Dieuveil Malonga: Meza Malonga

Chef Dieuveil Malonga on his farm inch Kigali, Rwanda.

Courtesy of Dieuveil Malonga

Before opening his Afro-fusion restaurant,Meza Malonga,inch Kigali, Rwanda, Congolese chef Dieuveil Malonga traveled to 48 African countries to scout ingredients and recipes. Much of his time was spent in villages; atomic number 2 believes the secret to African cuisine lie with information technology grandmothers. (In fact, Malonga’s granny run a small restaurant in Linzolo, just outside Brazzaville, the capital of the republic of Congo.)

Malonga make his culinary training inch Germany, simply He wanted to return to his roots. Meza Malonga’s tasting menu is plan about the restaurant’s three-acre farm. That might include bread made from yam and fonio (an ancient grain), beef function with eggplant tartare, or a palm oil and sweet-potato purée.

Malonga as well operates AN online community,chef in Africa, that helps more than 4,000 aspiring chefs and culinary professional connect and find jobs with hotels, restaurants, producers, and purveyors. next summer, he’ll open angstrom unit food invention lab, training school, and farm inch Musanze, angstrom unit city in the foothills of Rwanda’s Virunga Massif.

Ultimately, Malonga privation to elevate African cuisine to the planetary level. “Food doesn’t wealthy person borders,” Malonga says. “Food is education, food is sharing.”

Fatmata Binta: dine on angstrom unit Mat

Chef Fatmata Binta paints calabash that will be utilise during dine on a mat meals.

Courtesy of Fatmata Binta

chef Fatmata Binta turn up in sierra Leone, where she learned the cooking customs of the Fulani, angstrom roving tribe. After fleeing violence during the civil war in the 1990s, Binta’s family relocate from Freetown, the capital, to a small village in neighbour Guinea. “Everything was make from scratch,” Binta says. “We farmed, we composted. It brand you value food so much.”

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Today, Binta, World Health Organization lives in Accra, Ghana, tally a peregrine restaurant,dine on a mat. The restaurant honors the Fulani practice of communal meals: guests sit exterior inch makeshift restaurants set on rooftops, under shady trees, Oregon on sprawling lawns, hearing to storytelling and musical comedy recitals. A five-course repast of traditional foods — like Moringa, hibiscus, millet, dry out shrimp, anddawa dawa(locust beans) — be serve in hollowed-out calabash bowls. Binta HA also open pop-up book of dine on angstrom unit Mat throughout the U.S. and Europe, and her pioneering concept earned her the honored 2022 Basque Culinary World Prize. Binta was the number one African chef to win. “It’s a labor of love,” she says.

January Hendrik: Felix Klein Jan

chef Jan Hendrik At Felix Klein Jan, his eating place in the Kalahari Desert.

Hanru Marais Photography/Courtesy of Klein Jan (2)

Lord’s Day lunch was a “celebrated event,” says Jan Hendrik van 500 Westhuizen, better known as Jan Hendrik, WHO turn up on angstrom farm in the Mpumalanga province of South Africa. “Our feasts were always make from humble ingredient but made with care.”

The chef took these lessons abroad to Nice, France, where he open his number one restaurant, Jan, in 2013. in just three years, atomic number 2 get the first South African chef with a Michelin-starred restaurant. nostalgia found information technology way into dish like his signature dessert: angstrom unit meringue shell filled with sago (palm starch) pudding and served with AN orange-flower custard.

For his most Holocene act, Hendrik travel back to the source. Inspired past the underexplored plains of the Kalahari Desert, He open upKlein JanAt Tswalu Kalahari, South Africa’s large buck private wildlife reserve, in 2021. The menu reflect the region’s harsh, dry clime and characteristic aboriginal ingredient like tsama melons, balsam pear, and uphold pumpkins, spell using technique the likes of curing to increase the food’s shelf life. “My heritage is soh important to me,” Hendrik says. “It will always atomic number 4 like angstrom golden thread throughout my journey.”

bring a gustatory perception of Africa Into Your Kitchen

Want to attempt African recipes At home? Pick up chef, writer, and nutrient stylist Yewande Komolafe’s new book,My quotidian Lagos: Nigerian Cooking at Home and in the diaspora. Komolafe take reader on angstrom unit culinary circuit of the Nigerian capital, with idea for everyday dishes like yam fritters, asset celebratory meals such as braised goat leg in obe, A red-pepper sauce.