TOnY TASTES THE BURn

Just released, World Travel – An Irreverent Guide is Anthony Bourdain’s posthumous catalogue of his travels and global culinary experiences gleaned over years and then lovingly stitched together by co-writer, Laurie Woolever. This extract distils his take on Mozambique, and why he declared its food Africa’s best

In 1975, the newly independent Mozambique looked forward to a brighter future. But this was not to be. Yet rather than giving up after enduring a 16-year civil war – one of Africa’s most brutal and senseless – the country picked itself up and began the enormous, daunting task of rebuilding, well, everything, from the ground up.

There are very few places left in this world like Mozambique. The climate is nice. The people are really nice and the food is extraordinary.

Yet today, Mozambique is barely a pit stop on the tourist trail. It was with all this in mind that I arrived on my first visit to this East African country of 23 million people.

Mozambique, it should be pointed out, is a darling of the World Bank. It’s seen as an African success story, and the fact is, things are good, very good, here, compared with how things have been in the past. Five hundred years of truly appalling colonialism, 18 years of enthusiastic but inept Communism, and a brutal and

Shockingly, people here, and throughout the country, after being relentlessly screwed by history, are just as relentlessly nice.

And the food is the best I’ve had in Africa. Brazilian spices, Indian curries, the best of Africa and Asia, Arab traders, a dizzying AfroPortuguese, Latin American, pan-Arab, Asian mix. Along much of the coast of Mozambique, through good times and bad, what they always had was an abundance of incredible seafood.

And, in addition to the abundant use of coconut milk, it’s the beloved local hot pepper, piri-piri, that makes the food uniquely Mozambican.

Piri-piri chicken is arguably the national dish. You find it all over – restaurants, street corners, beach shacks. Sand, salt air, the sound of waves in the distance, the smells of grilling poultry, and spice of charcoal.

They continuously baste that grilling chicken with the piri-piri. Tangy, slightly tart, elements of citrus – they dole this stuff out like it’s pure cocaine. I mean, there’s never more than a tiny little bit in there.

What is this precious substance? Peanut oil, lemon juice, minced garlic, tomato – but it’s the piri-piri pepper that gives this stuff its trademark burn.

People here, after being relentlessly screwed by history, are relentlessly nice.

senseless 16-year civil war ending less than 20 years ago left Mozambique with a devastated social fabric, a shattered economy, and only the memory of an infrastructure.

Set out on the turquoise water of the Indian Ocean, [Ilha de Mozambique] was the first European settlement in East Africa. Vasco da Gama landed here in 1498 while sailing the trade winds in search of the spice route to India. But before him, there’d been Greeks, Persians, Chinese, Arabs, and Indians come down from the gulf or across the Indian Ocean…

Spend enough time on the island, and the rest of Africa can feel like a different continent. It’s a ruin really, a shell of its former glory, a crumbling monument to a colony built on the backs of the occupied and enslaved. Once storybook mansions, promenades, decaying, beautiful, but sad.

* Published by Bloomsbury and out now, Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever’s World Travel – An Irreverent Guide is a food-fuelled journey around the world and into the heart and mind of a legendary raconteur.