The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
CARL Joshua Ncube’s dream is to see a piece of Brazil mushroom and blossom on the corner of 11th Avenue and George Silundika Street.
He wants that little corner of Bulawayo to sparkle with the magic of the samba, basking in the colour and brightness of rhythms from South America.
No, Carl Joshua is not bringing the carnival to the City of Bulawayo. There will be no colourful skimpy outfits or swaying and swinging hips on the corner of 11th Avenue and George Silundika.
As perhaps Zimbabwe’s most prominent celebrity chef, Carl Joshua’s revolution will start on a plate. It is on plates that he expects South American flavours to dance, titillate and ultimately explode in the mouths of patrons at Carne Casa where he is going be the business development consultant for the next three months.
Carl Joshua’s presence will be a unique and interesting twist to the restaurant scene in Bulawayo and indeed the country at large. This will be the few times that a local chef of repute takes up such a residency at a restaurant in the city, bringing a unique blend of fine dining and entertainment in one swoop.
For Carl Joshua, the consultancy is not about star-power but showing the simple but unexplored culinary link between Bulawayo and Brazil.
“Basically, we are doing a restaurant consultancy with Carne Casa which is a Brazilian restaurant,” he told Sunday Life.
“What I have been brought in to do is to tie in the festivities of how the Brazilians actually are. The Brazilians cook great meat, they like to do it over an open fire, they have great women and it’s a laid-back, festive sort of environment. It sounds exactly like Bulawayo, to be quite honest.
Carl Joshua Ncube
They also love their football, like the people in Bulawayo. So, this serves to just show the link from a food perspective, and bring in an element of international meets local here in Bulawayo.”
The interaction of Brazilian and local cuisine, he said, would continue a long Zimbabwean tradition of providing a melting pot for various culinary traditions to intersect.
“Food is a movement. In the past, you had people from the East coming to Zimbabwe and trading with locals and you had people from the south coming up north, people from the north coming down south. It was just an exchange of ideas until we got to do what we do today,” he said.
Carl Joshua said that besides that over the next three months, he not only wanted bring Brazilian cuisine to Bulawayo, he also wanted to make sure that he sowed the culinary knowledge that he possesses, so that it could continue blooming after his three months was up.
“So, we are excited about that. We are excited about introducing new ways of dining and going out in Bulawayo. It’s a new way of celebrating our city. In the same way that we welcome guests into the country and we can push domestic tourism.
We also want to teach young people how to get into the hospitality game, how to sell themselves and how to grow their confidence.
That’s how I started as well, because I started by washing dishes in a restaurant and here, I am today, washing dishes in a restaurant. So, there are a lot things that we are going to be pushing,” he said.
As a multi-talented man, Carl Joshua wears many hats. For some, he is a comedian, a punchline king that has known to cook up a laugh-a-minute throughout his distinguished career.
Soon, he is set to making his bow as an actor, featuring in romantic comedy, Just Say Hello, which will make its big screen debut sometime this year.
For some, he is a chef and tourism ambassador, a keen advocate of Zimbabwean cuisine and culture. Over the next three months however, he said that his comedic talents will take a back seat, although there is no switch to turn off his humour.
“Everyone who’s going to be dining here, is going to experience some jokes from me. There is never a point when I switch off from telling jokes.
I suppose if you’re dining here and I come to your table, you guys are probably going to laugh at some point but in terms of comedy shows specifically, it is really not the focus of what I’m here to do.
I’m here to push the culinary side of things and this is also because we are producing a lot of content for international platforms and international tours.
Maybe after the tours I might be coming back to do some comedy shows but you never know, I might wake up tomorrow morning and decide that I want to crack jokes. Something might have happened in Bulawayo, maybe to Sandra Ndebele or Vusa Mkhaya and I decide that I want to talk about it in my comedy,” he said.
With the management at the restaurant applying for a licence for outside dining from the local authority, Carl Joshua said he was hopeful that the taste of Brazil would be felt even outside the restaurant’s premises.
“When people come to Carne Casa, we want the outside to be festive. We want to bring what we are doing inside to the outside.
So, we are working with the local authority to see how we can achieve that. It’s Brazil in Bulawayo and we want to make sure that the Brazil comes out of the restaurant.
This is actually what our objective actually is. So, we are going to be in talks with local authorities and tourism authorities so that we can create something a bit more special and festive within the street corner that we are in.
We are going to be doing a lot of content that is promoting Bulawayo and trying to see how as a restaurant we can help artistes and content producers that are doing their videos to try and bring about the element of supporting the wider community,” he said.
Recently, Carl Joshua put out the e-book Chikafu — the 100-recipe diary of a Zimbabwean celebrity chef, a publication which he hopes will continue spearheading the culinary and cultural revolution he wants to spearhead.
“Chikafu was a way of celebrating the past of Zimbabwean food, looking at the way that we cook food presently and also looking at how we are going to present it in the future.
I think quite often, we look at an ingredient and say you can’t do that with it but we are not very different to the rest of the world. Isitshwala is similar to what is served in other countries. The Italians have polenta and the Indians use dosa. There are so many things that are similar to what we would call sadza in Zimbabwe.
So Chikafu was just a way of looking at food in a global context and saying listen we have something to offer the world which is uniquely ours, but we also have some much knowledge of the world which we can bring into our cuisine,” he said.
Ncube said his travels around the world has showed him that Zimbabweans needed to wear they identity with a sense of pride, rather a cloak of shame which some seemed to act like it is.
“When we started comedy, my wife wanted to travel around the world. So, my tours around the world started from that perspective. We travelled and we saw the world and the more we saw the world, we saw that people were prouder of their identity than we were in Zimbabwe.
For example, in football, people will up the stadiums and wear their jerseys even when their team is losing.
“That applies in tourism as well, people would be proud of everything from their rural areas right up to their cities. But in Zimbabwe, we are ashamed or our rural areas, and we are ashamed of who we are as people. In fact, sometimes we are ashamed of our language. So, I thought, using my platform, my reach, I can try and instill some level of pride and do my part.
So I go around the world, winning at comedy and trying to show people that it’s okay to be proud of where you are from and who you are,” he said.
