Kigali Is Africa's Most Exciting Food City—and the Time to Visit Is Now

09.12.2024 - 18:21 / cntraveler.com

Urban Africa is a love letter to the bustling African metropolises south of the great desert—Dakar, Kigali, Lagos, Addis Ababa, and Johannesburg, to name a few—that are dynamic, diverse, and more traveler-ready than ever. Find more inspiration here.

The menu at Meza Malonga, a chic fine-dining spot in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, doubles as a syllabus in geography, and chef Diveuil Malonga makes an exemplary professor. “The philosophy is about promoting African ingredients,” he says as he presents a jar of Ivorian button mushrooms for me to inspect alongside my hibiscus-and-beetroot-dusted beef tartare. Now here’s a whiff of the Egyptian black lemon accompanying a Burundian tree tomato sorbet, all but obscured under cascades of dry ice; later I study the rondelles—a kind of nutmeg found in Burkina Faso and Mali, pungent with a loamy, garlicky bouquet—that play a starring role in a plate of Mombasa shrimp crowned with diaphanous ribbons of kombucha-fermented carrots and strokes of Ghanaian shito cream.

Chef Diveuil Malonga is a champion of pan-African ingredients, having traveled through 46 African countries before opening Meza Malonga.

Meza Malonga's tasting menu sweeps across the continent over nine delicately plated courses.

“People have this idea of fine dining in Europe, they think it will be the same here,” says Malonga, whose gentle, soft-spoken nature belies the shelf of awards sitting a few feet away. “This is very different—we want to give an experience.” By the end of nine courses, my palate has mapped the continent.

Malonga, with his Adidas cap slung backwards, presides over the open kitchen as chefs swirl around in a seamlessly composed dance, tweezing, saucing, and wiping under his tutelage. Born in Congo and raised in Germany and France, Malonga journeyed through 46 of Africa’s 54 countries before opening Meza Malonga in Kigali 2020, calibrating his findings into a sweeping tasting menu that traverses the vast expanse of Africa. In May, he’ll open his dream campus two hours away on a farm in Musanze, with a restaurant, spice museum, food lab, and school. “There’s a food revolution happening in Rwanda,” he says. “People today are traveling everywhere from Copenhagen to Brazil just for food—Africa has something to offer.”

Right now in Kigali, an exciting food scene is growing, fueled in part by the moneyed travelers who pass through on their way to the country’s pricey lodges for gorilla trekking. It’s buoyed by local products and inventive chefs; dare I say, there’s a similar alchemy to Copenhagen in the early 2000s, when a sprightly chef named Rene Redepi was to launch a thousand careers and a fine-dining revolution with Noma.

“Thirty years ago, no one was going to Copenhagen to eat,