Will African cuisine ever reach the world stage? More Michelin-starred fine dining restaurants embrace it while the first Middle East & North Africa’s 50 Best Restaurant awards just took place
- Chinese-Canadian Chef Jeremy Chan cooked at the French-inspired Florilège in Tokyo and now runs two-Michelin-starred Ikoyi in London, while Ghana’s Selassie Atadika runs Midunu in Accra
- Alexandre Mazzia grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo, trained with Pierre Hermé, and now owns AM par Alexandre Mazzia in Marseilles, France
French cuisine has long epitomised the ideal of fine dining, with Japanese food increasingly revered for the purity of its ingredients, technique and flavour. European, North American and Asian dishes in general are largely familiar to a global audience, and Latin American cuisines have won growing global acclaim. But African food?
“It’s pretty much the last frontier. The other continents have been heavily explored at the gastronomic level for generations,” says Ghanaian chef Selassie Atadika, who runs Midunu, a nomadic private dining events enterprise in Accra.
Atadika, who has taken what she calls her “new African cuisine” to the US, the Netherlands, Australia and South Africa, says she has seen increasing interest in African food over the last few years.
It is a sentiment shared by 50 Best, the organisation that runs the World’s 50 Best awards, and presented the first Middle East & North Africa’s 50 Best Restaurants in February. “African and African-inspired cuisine has definitely started gaining greater presence on the global gastronomic stage,” says William Drew, 50 Best’s director of content.
Many international cities outside the continent have long boasted authentic, casual and often small restaurants offering the African diaspora a taste of home. North African cuisines – especially Moroccan – are also generally familiar beyond the region’s borders.
But East or West African cuisine at the fine dining level is virtually unknown. This is certainly the case in Asia. Cities like London though, that have long attracted people from every corner of the globe, are starting to tell a different story.
Chinese-Canadian chef Jeremy Chan, who was born in the UK but grew up in Spain, the US and Hong Kong, runs two-Michelin-starred London hotspot Ikoyi with business partner and childhood friend, Nigerian-born Iré Hassan-Odukale.
The challenge is broader exposure to African ingredients, and this requires more chefs of non-African background communicating with African chefs
Chan uses West African spices in his kitchen, and the restaurant is named after a neighbourhood in Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos.