Congolese Chef Dieuveil Malonga Becomes First African on Qatar Airways' 'Flavours to Fly For' Programme

On select Qatar Airways flights, including the Kigali-to-Doha route, passengers at 35,000 feet (10,668m) can now eat tuna seared lightly and served with beetroot cream and passion fruit. The menu is the work of Dieuveil Malonga, a 34-year-old Congolese chef and restaurateur, who has become the first African to join the airline's "Flavours to Fly For" culinary programme.

Malonga brings his signature Afrofusion cooking to the programme. He joins a line-up of international chefs that includes Curtis Stone, Vicky Lau, Jordy Navarra, Garima Arora, Michihiro Haruta, James Knappett and Michael Meredith. He says he is glad to be first, and just as glad not to be last. He hopes the opening leads to others, and that Africa's ingredients, food culture and heritage reach a wider audience through it. As he puts it, Africans celebrate with food, and that is what he wants to promote.

Three dishes anchor his in-flight creations. Tuna Mi-Cuit is a lightly seared tuna loin with beetroot cream, pearl onion, passion fruit and cucumber. Zanzibar Spiced Pulled Chicken comes on brioche rolls with cucumber and onion pickles. The dessert is a 70% Chocolate Moelleux, a soft chocolate cake served with a Rwandan volcanic coffee sauce and caramel cream. Malonga says the menu draws on Rwanda, Zanzibar, Senegal and other East and West African countries. The next one will turn south, with South African flavours and dishes from Mozambique and Namibia.

His own story begins in Linzolo, a village near Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo, where his grandparents raised him. His grandfather farmed. His grandmother prepared and sold street food. He says he grew up surrounded by talk of cooking and farming, and feels he was raised by food.

The dish he remembers most is saka saka, the cassava leaf stew his grandmother made every day. It is something like a national dish in Congo and appears at celebrations. Hers, he says, was different, made with a mix of vegetables, smoked meats and smoked shrimp. He has gone back to Congo many times since moving away and has never found the same flavour. He believes the love she put into it made the difference, and says her recipe is still the best.

At 13, Malonga moved to Germany to join his older sister in the town of Warstein, where he settled with an adoptive family. He remembers the cold, and says it took about three years to connect with himself. Cooking was his comfort, because he missed the food culture of home. His adoptive mother understood what he calls the food language, and they cooked lunch and dinner together on weekends and after school. When the family asked what he wanted to do with his life, he told them he wanted to be an international chef that people talk about in the future.

He trained at one of Germany's leading culinary schools and later in Michelin-starred kitchens. There he began working indigenous African ingredients into his dishes, introducing teachers and fellow students to flavours they did not know. That experimentation became the base of his Afrofusion style, which pairs African culinary traditions with contemporary technique.

In 2015 he returned to Africa and began a journey that has taken him to more than 48 countries. On the road he met chefs and farmers with excellent products whom nobody knew. In 2016 he founded Chefs in Africa to connect them, promote African produce and nurture emerging culinary talent. He also runs Meza Malonga, a farm-to-table restaurant in Kigali, where he is based. The next thing to watch is the South African menu, along with whether other African chefs follow him into the programme.