leah van deventer | The Luxury of Slowness & The Return of Africa’s Oldest Culinary Arts

In the age of anti-griddles and alginate pearls, where dinner sometimes arrives as vapour and menus read like science experiments, it’s easy to forget that real culinary magic doesn’t require a lab coat. In fact, the smartest thing you can do to food might be the oldest: simply apply fire, or allow it to ferment. Indeed, African cuisines have been quietly – and gloriously – perfecting these techniques for centuries, from the ember-slowed potjies of South Africa to mursik in Kenya, the fermented sour milk prized for its distinctive tang and smoky flavour.

Let’s start with fire. Open, crackling, and elemental… the kind of flame that blackens maize, imbues meats with a smoky swagger and turns cassava from toxic root to staple starch. Of course, Africa is not the only place where fire is used for cooking, and, according to the World Health Organisation, a quarter of the world’s population still routinely do this today. For many, though, this is a necessity rather than a preference; as such, it’s long been shunned as a humble means to an end rather than something suitable for haute cuisine.

Yet cooks from Cape Town to Kigali know that the lick of flames brings more than heat: it brings character. You can taste the terroir of Kameeldoring in a braai just as surely as you can detect oak in a Burgundy.

In northern Ghana, tô zaafi, a sort of dumpling, is simmered low and slow over an open fire, while in Ethiopia, doro wat chicken stew bubbles for hours in clay pots nestled into the hearth. These slow seductions coax out flavour in a way a Thermomix never could.

Global fine dining is catching on, and cooking over coals is being rebranded not as a rustic fallback but as a culinary choice, steeped in control and complexity. Indeed, Michelin-starred kitchens are increasingly revisiting fire and clay not as curiosities, but as central culinary tools. At Saison in San Francisco, the open hearth is the heart of the kitchen; here, fire is used with precision to develop layers of flavour across entire tasting menus. At Humo in London – where I had the pleasure of dining earlier this year – the entire menu is wood-fired on a four-metre-long grill. Here, dishes are categorised by stages of fire: Ignite, Smoke, Flame, and Embers, guiding diners through a sensory journey.

I had a similar experience last year at Arca, a World’s 50 Best Restaurant in the coastal Mexican town of Tulum. Here, not only is the food cooked over an open fire, but Mayan herbs are burnt in surrounding braziers, so you are enveloped in aromatic smoke while feasting, adding to the mood.

Now let’s talk fermentation, which is where the alchemy really gets delicious, in a microbial ballet that unlocks flavours far beyond the sum of its parts. Take smen, the aged fermented butter employed in Moroccan and Algerian cooking. Buried and matured until it takes on a rich, funky aroma, smen adds depth to couscous and stews much like blue cheese or fish sauce might in other cuisines. Or consider ugba in Nigeria, where oil bean seeds are transformed into a pungent delicacy with the kind of nose that would make a French cheesemaker weep with joy. Rich and complex, these foods have been carrying the savoury intensity we now label as umami long before it had a name, let alone a PR team.

Aside from being vehicles of flavour, fire and fermentation are also innately sustainable. Fermentation reduces waste, boosts nutrition and requires nothing but time and a little patience. Fire cooking sidesteps the electricity grid, and – so long as the wood is responsibly harvested – it’s supportable.

In a world obsessed with immediacy and fast food, there’s radical luxury in slowness. Real fermentation can’t be hurried. Fire must be tended, coals nursed, pots turned with care. These traditions demand attention, intuition, and generational knowledge – all of which are increasingly rare, and thus, paradoxically, luxurious.

This global pivot has finally brought some attention to African chefs who’ve long practised such techniques. Pierre Thiam and Selassie Atadika are being recognised for preserving and elevating West African foodways, and Fatmata Binta’s nomadic Fulani dining project shares ancestral practices through modern formats. Meanwhile, restaurants like Ikoyi and Tatale in London are reframing African food as elegant, not folkloric.

Perhaps, with these forerunners spearheading trends, the future of fine dining may not look like a lab at all. It may look like a fire pit, and smell gloriously of smoke.