The 14-course dinner redefining Zambian cuisine

Fine dining in Zambia has long meant replicating European techniques. But chef Sungani Phiri's new home restaurant is boldly elevating Zambia's ingredients – and its culinary profile.

I'm sitting at an outdoor verandah with my family in a suburb of Livingstone, Zambia, when chef Sungani Piri brings out our fourth course.

It's a black cone-shaped canape made of cassava, served on a bed of millet inside a black potjie – a three-legged cooking pot. Filled with avocado ice cream and topped with edible gold flecks, it's almost too pretty to eat. But I take a bite; it's simultaneously sweet and savoury. The gold, Phiri informs us, is an homage to the Copperbelt, Zambia's mining region.

These dishes are Zambia on a plate, yet unlike anything most travellers – or locals – will have encountered in the tourist capital, where restaurants usually cater to international tastes and fine dining has long referenced European techniques. Visitors hoping to try traditional Zambian cuisine typically encounter buffets of stews, boiled vegetables and nshima, the porridge-like cornmeal that is our staple food. 

But Sungani Restaurant, whose fine dining tasting menu is entirely rooted in Zambia's indigenous ingredients and culinary memory, offers travellers a whole new way to experience Zambia's flavours – and a window into Zambian culture itself. 

This is also Chef Phiri's home. And there are still 10 courses to go. 

Visitor itineraries to Zambia usually focus on activities that celebrate its immense natural riches, like walking safaris through Mopane forests or hiking the magnificent Victoria Falls; the world's largest waterfall. Rarely do travellers venture to quiet city suburbs, let alone dine there. But just half an hour's drive north of the Falls, Phiri has been quietly developing the country's first molecular gastronomic experience, and making its cuisine a destination in itself. 

Before launching Sungani last year, Phiri trained with two-Michelin-starred chef Sven Niebremer in South Africa, then served as head chef at Royal Chundu lodge in Livingstone and Botanica in Lusaka.

Phiri's groundbreaking "New Zambian cuisine" was born from an argument. After culinary school, he planned to embrace the European fine dining techniques he'd been taught. But his sister challenged the notion as "pretentious" if done without grounding them in Zambia itself. Inspired, Phiri decided that his own fine-dining restaurant would elevate Zambia's culinary tradition and began experimenting with ingredients he had grown up eating.

"When I place a chibwantu root in someone's hands before they eat, I'm not just showing them an ingredient – I'm taking them somewhere," he explained. "To the river, to the bush, to a Zambian childhood. For an international guest it opens a door they didn't know existed. For a Zambian guest, it's a moment of recognition and pride – seeing something deeply familiar treated with reverence and wonder."

His decision to host the experience inside his own residence was equally deliberate. "When you want to honour someone here,........

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