05-05-2015
Angola’s pavilion at Expo, a very complex "theatre machine" that takes you by the hand through the renewed gastronomic delicacies of the country, what with fish and wide pastures. It is possible to taste their specialties in two restaurants: street food on the ground floor and “gourmet” cuisine on the first floor
Carrot cream with ginger and orange. Prawn soup. Clams with coriander and extra virgin olive oil. Ossobuco with polenta. To which kind of cuisine are we referring? This is a rhetorical question if you got here after reading the title. You wouldn’t have guessed, it would have been difficult to recognise the signs of Angolan cuisine. Because this, in people’s opinion, remains an impossible to place country in Africa, vaguely lashed by internal conflicts to grab petrol and diamonds.
Yet a decade has gone by since those tragic events, years during which the country – four times as big as Italy with less than half its population – experienced a stable political-democratic system and a significant economic growth. You can sense it in front of its pavilion, right at the entrance of Expo, on the left. Outside it is a gigantic structure recalling the typical geometry of Angolan fabric, with large spaces among which natural light seeps in.
Elsa Viana, Angola’s culinary ambassador, with a diploma she received at the Lenôtre School in Paris
The cuisine can count on 1,650 km of coastline and a frenetic fishing activity, especially in the south, closer to Namibia (to the north there’s Congo, and to the east Zambia). In the inland there are 58 million hectares of pastures and fields. Three different culinary traditions end up in the pot: Portuguese and Brazilian because of their domination and Italian too (for some historic unknown reason, on top of ossobuco with polenta, dry pasta is also very popular).
In the pavilion, a series of photos enrich the imbondeiro, a hi-tech baobab
Our 2015 World Fair Hotline
by
born in Milan, 1973, freelance journalist, coordinator of Identità Golose World restaurant guidebook since 2007, he is a contributor for several magazines and teaches History of gastronomy and Culinary global trends into universities and institutes. twitter @gabrielezanatt instagram @gabrielezanatt
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