How fortunate we are that chef Duncan Welgemoed comes from South Africa and not, say, Zambia where the staple dish is something called nshima – the same maize meal porridge called pap in South Africa, made marginally more interesting by the addition of tiny dried river fish called kapenta.
While both pap and kapenta (imported from Zambia) have a place on Welgemoed’s Africola menu, the potential for Zambian cuisine petered out with the introduction of rather bad English colonial cooking, while South Africa, like Australia, had multiple migrations of people who ate more interesting food, having been settled since the 17th century by colonists from Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, France and the UK.
Beef jerky with kapenta. Photo: Tony Lewis
The resulting melting pot came to be known as “rainbow” cuisine, which included several distinctive styles of cooking including Cape Dutch – which brought in spices such as chilli, nutmeg and allspice; Cape Malay – spicy sambals, pickled fish, with unique dishes such as bobotie, spiced minced meat with an egg-based topping; and Indian, again with unique dishes such as bunny chow, in which curry is stuffed into a hollowed-out loaf of bread.
That plus the Afrikaan influence led not only to a great love of barbecues (or braai in Afrikaans) but a host of total unpronounceable and unrecognisable names for dishes and ingredients about which Australian diners – including most who dine at Africola – haven’t a clue. About the only clearly recognisable feature of Africola that is readily recognisable is Welgemoed’s love of fire, and there’s plenty of that, both in the hearth and in the belly.
Duncan Welgemoed. Photo: Tony Lewis
For the rest, we just have to take Welgemoed on trust, and there’s plenty of reason for that. Although his father was a traditional Swiss-style chef, Welgemoed, who grew up in north Johannesburg, instead wanted to be an Egyptologist and helped out in the kitchen as a hobby and to earn some cash before, at the age of 17, he headed to London.
He immediately lost what cash he had in a Soho strip club, as 17-year-olds tend to do, which forced him back into the kitchen, initially at a French restaurant. That ended badly when he tripped over a large stick blender and spilled 50 litres of bouillabaisse into the restaurant. Not a good start: “I hated London,” he says.
Africola interior. Photo: Tony Lewis
But things soon picked up when he joined head chef Michael North in his pub, the Goose in Britwell Salome, a tiny Oxfordshire hamlet. Out of the way it may have been, but it soon picked up a Michelin star, giving Welgemoed a springboard into Raymond Blanc’s two star and much more lauded Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons for 18 months, and then on to the even more celebrated Fat Duck under Heston Blumenthal. Unlike many itinerant chefs who simply enjoy brief stages at such restaurants, Welgemoed was part of the team.
When you consider Welgemoed’s cooking in Adelaide, at Bistro Dom and now at Africola, probably his most influential influence was Michael Robinson at his Berkshire restaurant the Pot Kiln. Not because he cooked for Kate Middleton and Prince William on their first date, but because Robinson insisted everything served in his restaurant “had to be hunted, fished or grown by us,” Welgemoed says.
Africola exterior. Photo: Tony Lewis
It was raw, earthy, basic and wonderful – just like the times Welgemoed’s second mother, nanny, housekeeper or whatever, Sotho, took him into the townships outside Johannesburg where he enjoyed traditional Zulu cooking, found himself cleaning chickens at the age of five, lying on his stomach in search of finger-sized mopane worms, spikey blue and green caterpillars often eaten fried with garlic as a crisp snack.
They don’t yet feature on the Africola menu, although there’s the Afrikaans favourite, biltong ($10) – in this case thick chunks of dried Coorong Angas beef, lots of flavour, great for the jaw muscles, marginally better than chewing your shoes. Much easier is the tiny, crunchy kapenta river fish with peri-peri mayonnaise ($5; pictured at top).
Kingfish sashimi. Photo: Tony Lewis
It’s a small menu with lots of things you’ve never heard of (morogo sauce, boom chakalakka and so on) but no need to panic. The easy way out is to let them feed you with the kitchen menu ($65) and let the super friendly waiting staff lead you through it. Vegetarians and vegans, perhaps surprisingly, are very welcome. Welgemoed’s menu changes daily and is flexible to the point of being contortionist. He might, for instance, have baby pumpkins simmering in a curry sauce in a cast iron pot over the fire.
Seafood features in dishes such as smoked mussels and chunks of spanner crab sitting on charred cos lettuce hearts with a South African cider sauce ($15); shavings of kingfish cured in salt, sugar, orange peel and dried apricot skin, on a green morogo (wild spinach) sauce – all under a shard of squid ink infused toasted nori ($19; image above); and a couple of massive chargrilled king prawns ($17; image below) with pumpkin two ways – a sweetish puree with yuzu, a Japanese citrus, and pickled raw in green atchar, generally made with unripe green mangoes and chilli.
King prawns. Photo: Tony Lewis
If you were to have just one dish at Africola it should be peri-peri chicken (terrific value at $60 for two; pictured at top), based on a famous sauce invented by Welgemoed’s late father and still made and sold by his mother in Johannesburg. Fabulously good chicken in mpumalanga fire sauce (a caramelised version of the fresh peri-peri sauce on the table in Coke bottles; image below), with an iron pot of meltingly soft chicken hearts and livers, a second pot of pap (that maize meal porridge) topped with tomato gravy and leek ash, and a small side dish of banana curry. There’s no better dish in town, best eaten with a glass of Lammershoek Roulette, a blend of Shiraz, Carignan and Grenache from Swartland.
Peri peri sauce. Photo: Tony Lewis
Welgemoed’s showstopper is, of course, the whole roasted cow’s head ($70 for two), turned into three dishes: chargrilled cheeks, an aromatic curry using the palate, undercheek and brains, and roast tongue. He’s served it barely a dozen times since opening Africola last November – none more famously so then when the band Faith No More ordered it. Their social media recording the occasion was seen by more than 20 million people. It’s served long horns and all at the table, so carnaphobics will just have to avert their eyes, or move table.
It also has to be said that Africola is a great looking place, the work of local designer (and restaurant partner) James Brown and his team at Mash. Brown’s work will be familiar to Bali-goers at Motel Mexicola and locally at Parwana Kutchi Deli in the East End, though his design work goes well beyond restaurants and bars.
Africola interior. Photo: Tony Lewis
Brown came up with the name Africola. He was in a Darwin hospital recovering from a skate-boarding spill in which he fractured an arm, when he watched a movie about the 1974 Muhammad Ali – George Foreman fight Rumble in the Jungle in Kinshasa. A key sponsor was the German-owned Afri-Cola, a popular drink that is still sold across middle and southern Africa.
At Africola, Brown’s design suggests Mambo meets Freda Kahlo meets African shebeen. It’s a blaze of colour and looks haphazard, which merely disguises very deliberate detail, with a mix of kitchen bar stools overlooking fire pit and wood oven, ‘bar’ bar stools, intimate banquettes and outdoor tables.
Brown says no-one ever asks what the ceiling high wall slogans mean, so we can help. Woza Lapa simply means “hurry up!”, while Dagga (a herbal stimulant) Stoep (a place to enjoy said stimulant) is another. Fokoffpolisiekar is simply a quaint Johannesburg expression that really needs no explanation. Africola, if nothing else, is a lot of fun.
Africola
4 East Terrace, Adelaide
Ph (08) 8223 3885
Open for dinner Tuesday to Saturday.
