When they launched Le Palanka in Paris in 2008, the West African duo of Mamadou Koladé from Senegal and Christian Abégan from Cameroon sought to provide a unified showcase of the vast and varied cuisine of Africa and its diaspora. “We wanted to show African cuisine in all its excellence,” says Mamadou. “In Paris, African cuisine is ghettoïsé. You find a Senegalese restaurant here, an Ivorian one there, a Malian one there. We wanted to bring everything together in one place.” We are seated in Le Palanka Nairobi which launched in 2011. Across me is the shisha lounge on whose wall is painted a mural bearing the faces of four African musical greats. I identify them easily: South Africa’s Miriam Makeba, Nigeria’s Fela Kuti, Senegal’s Youssou Ndour and Cameroon’s Manu Dibango. Mamadou is impressed.
In a 2009 Le Figaro article, Alain Mabanckou cited Le Palanka as the best African restaurant in Paris. He praised chef Christian Abégan’s ability to “effectively marry Western flavours with those of the remotest corners of the Dark Continent.” Mabanckou was born in Congo-Brazzaville and is a French citizen. One of the most renowned and controversial Francophone African writers, his writing depicts the contemporary experience of Africans on the continent and in France. He won the prestigious Prix Renaudot for his 2006 book, Les mémoires de porc-épic (Memoirs of a Porcupine). Whether his culinary opinions carry any weight in a country where African cuisine is relegated to the periphery is open to debate. Writing in his now defunct blog in 2011, he expressed an array of newfound reservations about one of Black Paris’ most popular restaurants chief among them the absence of his friend chef Christian Abégan, the source of Le Palanka’s unique touch.
The pan-African spirit permeates through Le Palanka, starting with its name. The palanca negra is the Portuguese name of the giant sable antelope, Angola’s national symbol. The Angolan national football team is named the Palancas Negras in its honour. At Le Palanka Nairobi, the Congolese head chef Emmanuel converses with the predominantly Kenyan staff in fluent Swahili. Mamadou himself has picked up a few phrases but finds it difficult in comparison to Wolof because it has ‘too many words’. “Maneno mengi!” he reiterates, to emphasize its difficulty. Koffi Olomide and the Quartier Latin band are playing through the speakers and the Congolese rumba sets the right ambiance for the contemplation of the menu which promises to take one on a sophisticated African journey through a fusion of exotic flavours from across the continent. Mabanckou wrote that one goes to Le Palanka “for Africa, for the atmosphere.” Mamadou says that he feels at home anywhere on the continent. The original Le Palanka sought to create the feeling of home for Africans right in the heart of Paris. An offshoot in the leafy upmarket Lavington suburb in Nairobi followed five years later, and an opening in Dakar’s oceanfront La Corniche is planned for later this month.
“There are many clichés about African food. You will hear people saying that it is too spicy or too heavy or too oily, that it is unhealthy or that it takes too long to prepare. We wanted to demonstrate the opposite. What we propose at Le Palanka is la cuisine africaine revisitée,” says Mamadou who spent his childhood in Casamance in the south of Senegal and has worked as a telecoms executive in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. It was while living in France that he met Christian Abégan who in addition to sharing his passion for music—Mamadou plays the xylophone and Christian is a singer—also dreamed of modernising African cuisine.
Their nouvelle cuisine africaine draws heavily from Christian Abégan’s Cordon Bleu training. The Palanka approach is two-pronged: there are les plats traditionnels and les plats gastronomiques. The traditionnels are dishes that are representative of a country’s fare, for example mafe, a groundnut sauce from Mali or thieboudienne, rice and fish from Senegal. The gastronomiques are the more inventive dishes featuring ingredients such tofu. “Tofu is not an African ingredient but we wanted to show that it can be Africanised,” he says. The menu features three courses in the French style: entrée, main course and dessert. The Paris menu is different from the Nairobi one. “In the Paris restaurant, we have dishes from Louisiana and Guadeloupe to cater to the Black diaspora there, for example,” says Mamadou. The Nairobi menu, although featuring a few East African specialties, is primarily designed to acquaint the diner with the fundamentals of West African cuisine.
The main meal is structured around a meat dish and an accompaniment: goat stew, chicken yassa, pan-fried fish and beef fillet are served with ugali, fufu, matoke, plantain or rice. The chicken yassa from Senegal and the jollof rice from Nigeria are the most popular dishes, says Mamadou. The savory sauces are well-seasoned but less fiery than one expects. “We toned it down because we have found that extremely spicy food is not very popular here,” says Mamadou. Piment or hot sauce is served on the side for those who require more heat. Most of the ingredients are sourced locally and substitutes can often be found. For thieboudienne for example, cod is used instead of grouper. The more elusive ingredients such as the pungent dried fish known as yet are brought from Dakar or from Château Rouge, the commercial hub of the West African community in Paris. The bread is baked in the kitchen, proof of chef Emmanuel’s vast repertoire. Even the humblest traditional fare is presented with flair: finely chopped parsley is sprinkled over white mounds of fufu.
Chefs of Francophone heritage are at the vanguard of the African culinary renaissance. South Africa-based Burundian chef Coco Fathi Reinarhz describes his cooking as a combination of classic French cuisine and the most opulent of African flavours. Reinharz whose appearances on Masterchef SA have catapulted him to celebrity chef status runs Sel et Poivre in Johannesburg’s affluent Sandton area. South Africa is at the forefront of food reality television on the continent with its versions of internationally recognized shows such as Masterchef as well as home-cooked food reality TV in the form of shows such as Cooked in Africa Films’ Ultimate Braai Master which is currently in its third season. Executive producer Peter Gird attributes the show’s longevity to its authenticity: "Seeing a truly South African show – made for South Africans by South Africans, featuring naturally-fitting South African brands, and showcasing our beautiful country and its diverse culinary cultures – broadcast to over 100 million viewers worldwide proves that anything is possible in the world of TV, where content is king.”
Celebrity chefs and food reality TV are part and parcel of the African culinary renaissance whose most visible personality is the Ethiopian-born New Yorker Marcus Samuelsson. The Francophones have also embraced the media element of modern cuisine, although their reach and popularity is limited due to the language barrier. Congolese chef Dieuveil Malonga who describes his style as “Afro-fusion” became a rising star after his brief stint on French Top Chef. French company Luwak Productions created a show called Star Chef which airs on Francophone channels and is going into its third season. Christian Abégan is a judge. The show features six hopefuls from different countries in Francophone Africa locked together in a house to battle it out for fame and fortune—Congolese chef Christian Baby Yumbi, the winner of season 2, walked away with 10 million CFA francs.
Star Chef’s first season featured only one female contestant which drew criticism from some viewers as women do the cooking in most African households. Cooking is the traditional preserve of women in Africa but female chefs are underrepresented in professional kitchens. Kenyan Stanley Mwangi who is executive chef of Nigeria’s Southern Sun Ikoyi lamented about the diminishing rank of female chefs in Nigeria in a 2014 New Telegraph interview saying that lack of proper training discourages women from aspiring to the top of the profession. Christian Abégan provides training for the Le Palanka staff. Mamadou also brings in people from the respective countries to demonstrate how the dishes are prepared. Vivian, a cook at Le Palanka tells me that professional courses are prohibitively expensive. “You should get a qualification because it increases your employability but it’s hard to get one because the colleges charge high fees. You have to pay for practical exams, to buy ingredients and materials and so on. I practise at home to improve my skills. My friends are always happy to sample my cooking. I’m making thieboudienne tomorrow,” she says.
At one of the stoves, Stanley the bartender is stirring a pan of boiling bissap. Bissap, a juice made from dried red hibiscus flowers, is the national drink of Senegal. Other Senegalese juices such as ditakh, bouye, madd and corrosol are available. Stanley concocts a wide variety of cocktails—my favourite is Evasions, made from bissap, whiskey and lime juice. There’s also the Sawa Sawa, a combination of bissap, vodka and cassis. But the cocktails are pricey, as is everything on the menu. This is the chief complaint of disgruntled Tripadvisor reviewers which I raise with Mamadou. Are the high ‘international’ prices justifiable? “We are not overpriced,” he says. This raises the question, who exactly is the target market for African haute cuisine?
The spectrum of food consumption on the continent ranges from acute starvation to mere sustenance to refined sumptuousness. According to FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations, Sub-Saharan Africa is the region with the highest prevalence of hunger. One out of four Africans is undernourished. As Mabanckou asks in his article, “Should one eat to live or live to eat?” The food industry provides livelihoods for millions across the continent, from farm to fork. The actual size of the growing African middle class has been called into question—it might be smaller than previously believed—which means the culinary renaissance in Africa’s restaurants is only accessible to the financially well-off.
Haute cuisine is by its very definition elitist, but African celebrity chefs are playing an important role in the preservation of African culinary traditions. Christian Abégan has said that the reason why African cuisine is not well-known throughout the rest of the world is because the transmission of knowledge on the continent is primarily oral. Like the griot who was the guardian of a people’s oral history, the African reality TV chef uses his modern medium to transfer African culinary knowledge to younger chefs thus safeguarding it for future generations. It’s a horrifying thought, reality television revitalizing African food and serving as a repository for traditional knowledge but perhaps reality television is the great equalizer that will democratize African fine dining and take the African culinary renaissance beyond the kitchens of Sandton, Lavington and La Corniche right into people’s homes. What is most important after all is not how African food is regarded in the world, but the regard in which Africans themselves hold their own food.