UberEats makes it easy to serve traditional African food your mom used to make.
My mother loves to tell the story of how, when she became a mother for the first time over 50 years ago, given the limitations of my father's salary as a teacher and the limited circumstances of the semi-urban village where we lived, she tried her best to follow everything in the baby books when I was born.
When I was old enough to eat solid foods, my mother tried to feed me a “modern” diet that many African mothers believed was better for babies than the traditional diets of the 1970s, even though it was often expensive.
This included ProNutro toddler cereal, store-bought jars of pureed apples, bananas and carrots, etc. But, to my mother's shame, I refused to eat anything fancy “English” – but when given ishteshwara (pappu) drenched in chicken gravy, I devoured it within minutes.
Thus began my lifelong love affair with African food. The problem is, living north of Johannesburg, African food isn't easy to come by — at least, that wasn't the case until recently.
I mean “real” African food – for example, fresh “hard-bodied” chicken that I used to drive 50km to a suburban butcher because the bland factory-farmed chicken from Pick n Pay, Shoprite, Checkers or Spar just didn't cut it sometimes.
Even their “free-range” chickens don't come close to the same flavor as their leaner, tougher cousins that are allowed to roam free in the countryside and peck at what they like, and the meat is tougher and needs to be boiled before frying, but it's worth the effort.
Then one day about five years ago, I was scrolling through Uber Eats, trying without much enthusiasm to decide whether to order pizza, chicken licken, or Nandos for lunch, when I stumbled upon a place advertising “traditional African food, just like your mom used to make back home in town.”
The menu had a surprising selection: from pap and dombolo (homemade dumplings) to tough chicken, pig's trotters, tripe and even amak imbi (mopani worms, my favourite). They also sold real amasi (fermented milk) – a deliciously thick and creamy version that I enjoyed with pap as a child, not the watery supermarket stuff in a plastic bottle.
I had found culinary bliss.
With just a few clicks on the Uber Eats app, you can order whatever you want to eat for delivery in under 30 minutes. Try the “Highfields” dish from Tsa restaurant in Fourways, which consists of pap, beef stew and kale and is named after the Highfields district in Harare, Zimbabwe. Or, if you're craving a taste of West Africa, you can order goat stew and jollof rice from Naija Lems in Bryanston.
When Uber Eats first launched in September 2016 with 75 restaurants in Johannesburg (its debut on the African continent), the offerings were pretty high-end, including Casalotti's Pizza, Momo Baohaus, and Paul's Homemade Ice Cream.
The concept proved so popular that the company expanded into fast food, allowing Johannesburg residents to have KFC or Nando's chicken, Ocean's Basket seafood, Burger King burgers and sushi delivered to their homes without having to make a trip to a crowded shopping mall food court.
But Gen Xers like me had to drive to Alexandra, Tembisa or Soweto to taste the homemade dumplings made with amasi or inkobe (a mix of maize kernels, crushed nuts, monkey nuts and beans, slow-cooked over a fire) that were a hallmark of our 1980s childhood.
And finally, Uber Eats realised that there was a huge market waiting to be opened up in townships and suburbs by delivering traditional African food to consumers’ doorsteps.
The thing we all love about African food is that we don't like to cook it. I still have traumatic memories of washing a stinky tripe over and over again as a teenager, under my mother's supervision, to get all the dirt off. And the smell lingers in the house for hours after cooking. But it was all worth it when I ate it.
Fast forward a few years and, thanks to Uber Eats, I can now indulge in some pig's trotter donboro (dumplings) without having to toil for hours in front of the stove.
It hasn't always been smooth sailing: Like many consumers, I have mixed feelings about Uber Eats, having experienced delivery delays, severe food poisoning after ordering food that was not even remotely prepared in sanitary conditions, and the hefty markup and delivery fees that come with ordering ready-made food through the app, which is a total rip-off.
But for me, a plate of pap, ibo bola (pumpkin leaves sauteed with tomatoes and onions) and amakumbi on a Sunday afternoon is well worth the price.
