Africola, Adelaide, is Duncan Welgemoed’s African journey
Africola is like nothing else. In a historic pub at the corner of East and North Terraces, partner James Brown, a designer, has given the place the look of an imagined, almost cartoonish African eating house with an unfettered palette of colours and textures, graphics and props. It’s a funky, contemporary, fun diner, no ethnic curiosity.
There are dining booths, tables and several eating bars: one perches over the beverage station of a terrific sommelier and an obsessed mixologist using spices like citrusy baobab and fragrant devil’s claw in his wacky drinks; another over a primal cooking station consisting of charcoal spit and wood oven. It’s a clue.
Then the menu. Crumbs. The vocabulary, the ingredients, the horror: cow’s head shaka, anyone? Peri peri chicken with hearts and livers? Some ideas are transparent. Wood oven sardines with poached plum, for example; charcoal prawns with preserved pumpkin. But boerewors yamampela with Soweto pickle, pap and sheba? That is when you reach for the Kitchen Menu (“Let us feed you, it’s best”) at $85.
And you can experience Africola at whatever level rings your bell. Just eat, drink and soak up the genuine hospitality. Or take a journey and try to understand the overlap of tribal foods, colonial influence and guest-worker culture, and take a guess at the mash-up. You won’t understand it, unless you’re South African, but you’ll get a taste, no pun intended.
For me it was almost a meal in two speeds: light, modern dishes with a new palate of flavours and techniques; and a feasting component that felt for all the world like I was at a Cape Town dinner party, learning, learning.
On one hand, the kingfish “muamba” (pictured): fillet cured with dried apricot skin and orange peel on a chlorophyll sauce of “morogo” (a green) with a wafer of pickled kohlrabi, a seaside succulent, cured porky bits and a sheet of squid ink pastry. Amazing dish.
On the other, the daily offer “op die spit”: an unrefined pile of meat and blood pudding from a spiced, yoghurt fed suckling pig cooked slow over charcoal with “boom chakalakka”, like a radicchio-based kimchi. It’s served with double-smoked buttermilk carrots, pap (white cornmeal, like polenta) and sheba (a concoction of fermented tomatoes and curry leaves). It’s generous, delicious, in every sense.
Between, there are superb Gulf prawns chargrilled with kombu butter, and two types of pumpkin condiment, each an entirely new experience. And “bush meats” – diced, raw kangaroo – with a fresh oyster emulsion, smoked oyster and pickled morogo. And later, dainty, super contemporary little desserts, like corn meal and fresh kernels caramelised with white chocolate and whole toasted hazelnuts, with hazelnut ice cream.
Ask and you’ll find it all has a link to the chef’s home, his narrative. Welgemoed does beauty. He does power. He does storytelling. He does direct. He’s a Hemingway of a chef. And Africola might be his first great novel.
Africola Chef Duncan Welgemoed helps launch The Australian Financial Review Australia's Top Restaurants!
Duncan Welgemoed and many other chefs and restaurateurs met at Crown Melbourne's Club 23 to launch The Australian Financial Review Australia's Top Restaurants, presented by Qantas Airways and Vittoria.
The chef of Africola said chefs make the best critics as they don't get much time off work and when they go out to eat they don't want to "be sustained".
"Because it's all learning for us, every time you go out," he said. "The restaurants that made the list I am sure are worthy of being there, it's just where they place."
Mr Welgemoed said there would definitely be surprises in the rankings.
"It's not where the critics think people should eat; it's where the chefs go and eat, so you could have Quay next to Golden Century next to Belle's chicken diner," he said. "It certainly opens it up a lot."
''At Africola, a South African themed restaurant and bar on Adelaide’s East Terrace, bar manager Andrew Cameron doesn’t see the value of bottling his aged cocktails.
“I serve mine straight from the barrel, but there are other bars where the cocktail has been in the barrel for three months and then they label it and they’ll say ‘this has been in the barrel for six months,’” he says.
“I think bottling is just another expense. And to be honest, time isn’t as significant as the temperature [when aging cocktails]. So you’ve got air conditioning on all day and then your venue gets to about 40 degrees when you close the door - that’s going to do different things to the drink as well. So temperature is more of a factor than time … something that tastes a way at three months will taste exactly the same after two months in a warmer year.”
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