Siya Kobo – original, relevant, overlooked

A golden tuile circlet was created before my eyes, out of what most families consider to be the treasure, the best bits at the bottom of the umphokoqo or puthu pot, the darker, not-quite-burned part.

Chef Siyabulela Kobo removed every last crumb, scraping everything out and boiling it with a little water, then processing what looked and smelled like gravy, till it was puree-smooth. He spread it very, very thinly on a silicon mat and slow-baked it. After a whole batch of catch-up chit-chat, in between preparations and plating, chef Siya’s focus moved to the cooling mat. He gently lifted the crispy, almost transparent pieces and served them atop a completed Umvubo or African Salad dish, quite astonishing in itself. But more about that in a moment. It deserves to be admired first.

African Salad.

“There is no reason to waste. An eco-chef knows how to use every single bit of an animal or plant, except anything actually poisonous, in the kitchen. I even want my plates to be earthen, so that they can return to the soil. The way to live and to be a true chef is to source and use our food very responsibly. I’m sure I told you before: ‘I am a Son of the Soil – and that is the story I have to tell as a chef’.”

He hadn’t told me that but I could have begun guessing when I met Siyabulela Kobo as one of the 11 South African chefs to have brought home awards in the international Culinary Olympics in 2012. His champion dish had been a clever one-piece dish composed of three differently treated beefy off-cuts of an animal, celebrating his Eastern Cape roots. Our chefs were generally acknowledging some of their South Africaness by cooking venison when they had to represent the country. No other chef I had met by then was doing any really exciting fine South African food, though Coco Renarhz was doing exciting fine African continental food.

I started on my African Salad. There were mysteriously semi-transparent pieces that weren’t aspic, then creamy ricotta-like balls, counter-textured by the crackly tuiles alongside large crumbles of yellow phutu, chilli-flaked. Dotted around were determined dollops of a salt-sweet dressing. With honey in it? Siya was laughing at my guesses. What he’d done was warm amasi so that it had split into whey and cheesy curds. He’d used the whey part, seasoned and jellied it. He’d then muslin-strained some of the curds to roll “cheeseballs” and mixed the softer curds with organic honey mostly, to make a silky dressing for the maize crumble. It was a tongue-tip sort of wonder-wander and I did taste-travel back to Port St Johns, coincidentally the very place from where Siya comes, up onto a soft hill with the refreshingly briny scent of the early morning sea rising, having spent the night in the guest-hut of a local family. With my eyes still closed, I was spooning sour but rich breakfast “maas” and listening to comforting sounds of chickens clucking across the grass.

Chef Siya experimenting with baobab powder – it won’t be a smoothie

Siyabulela, the young boy, learnt with some dismay that the cars being assembled in the Eastern Cape were fitted with imported components. He ardently wished to change that and work towards having local parts manufactured in South Africa. He enrolled at the Mtata Tech and studied Mechanical Engineering for three years. To fund himself further he moved to Joburg and worked as a waiter in Braamfontein, where he would offer to help in the kitchen and was finally doing some actual cooking. He was fixated by the making of food, the processes and the transformation of it. He had to do and learn more. Sometimes, he’d offer his services free and have to work night shifts somewhere else to survive but not get much sleep.

He worked his way through most of the big hotel kitchens and found more of his metier at Londolozi where he saw opportunities to work with local people for produce, to do local South African food and even grow it. After travelling and travelling, working and working, winning many awards, Siyabulelo wanted to come home and open his own South African place to produce his own locally relevant food and to mentor junior chefs, which he does now for the South African Culinary Team.

Chicken Chakalaka with isiGwampa

My following Kobo Cuisine dish was called Chicken Chakalaka with isiGwampa, very beautifully presented with substantial dark green, pumpkin leaf puree streaks. It turned out that each element cleverly introduced another. For instance, that puree was a link to the isiGwampa, which was the softened pumpkin leaf and yellow maize meal combined and deep-fried in fingers. A hint more of those morogo leaves were included in a deliciously slow-cooked ragout of peppers, tomato and onion that cosied up to a rooibos-smoked chicken thigh, stuffed with a mousseline of Chef Siya’s own chakalaka and chicken tidbits. And that was the introduction to a faultlessly-grilled, tender chicken breast, glazed and braised with the chakalaka itself. I was silent.

A golden tuile circlet of pot-scrapings

I just wondered how this chef, maybe the most relevant in South Africa, who has worked so damn hard, with so much dedication and originality, has ended up not really being able to serve his astonishing examples of South African cuisine at his own restaurant. The irony is that the people who go there to eat, I noticed, order toasted sandwiches. The restaurant is next to a backpackers in Maboneng. It is an affordable location but the guests’ food focus is more eke out than eat out, more See South Africa on Seventy-Five Rand a Day, rather than being able to appreciate the food of our brilliant local chef. To eat Chef Siya’s Kobo Cuisine one has to book for a group of 10 or so, so that he can stock up for the real feast of five or seven courses.

It is interesting that all the food awards that Siya Kobo has won mention the word “originality”. I would use the word “relevant”. When the world’s best restaurants or their chefs win awards, they do it because of using their imagination with what they have to hand that’s local. Mauro Colagreco uses what’s actually available and grown on the French-Italian border section of the riviera at Mirazur. Rene Redzepi sources his own local Danish stuff at Noma. If there’s no local meat that season from Redzepi’s area, he doesn’t use any, just the fruit, vegetables, weeds that are in season and locally available. Mauro and Rene don’t import some avoes or prawns from other countries when they run out.

So many struggle with the concept of South African cuisine and yet here’s the man who nails it, very able to produce the exciting food from local, traditional ingredients. I can’t find anything wrong with a falling-off-the-bone springbok shank but it’s not the only thing representing South African cuisine. Right now there are more people who have woken up to our own cuisine. People like Siphowe Sithole are producing excellent ingredients and the University of Pretoria is doing wonders training new chefs to create with ingredients we are rediscovering. But Siyabulelo Kobo is already exemplary, though battling financial and locational odds.

When I picked up my things to go, tourists were munching sarnies and Chef Siya was fiddling with baobab powder and an egg. The powder is something he was given and he liked the taste, “sort of tropical-sour, richer than just lemon”. I couldn’t even imagine what he’d do with that and some fresh fruit but I suspected it wouldn’t be a smoothie. I had a last question.

What would you make that says “Joburg Food”?

Chef Kobo’s face creased into a wide, slow smile, the smile of an inventor exploring a vision. “Come back – I know what we’ll do!” He told me and it’s a brilliant concept. I can’t wait.

Meanwhile, Redzepi would almost certainly envy the Son of the Soil chef’s ultra-South African pot-scraping food triumph. DM

Kobo Cuisine, 304 Fox Maboneng / 063 671 5402