Mario Almeida, the owner of the elegant restaurant Espaço Bahi’a in Angola’s capital city, says he can spot people who are new to his establishment by their wide-eyed expressions.
Crooning Portuguese music gives way to American jazz as slow-moving beams of light create a galaxy on the dark wooden panels between the second and third floors. African masks are clustered into a neat block on another wall, in line with the restaurant’s natural material aesthetic. Chandeliers with ostrich-egg lamp covers light the middle floor as the cool evening breeze blows off the bay through a long, rectangular window.
It’s an understated Moyo with a Lucophone twist.
Espaço Bahi’a’s three levels are connected by a black staircase snaking up inside the building. The design, created by Novo Design, a Portuguese company headquartered in Lisbon, works to create a sense of spaciousness, allowing you to see the cavernous restaurant from the top to the bottom floor.
On the highest level, Angola’s elite recline in low-slung, cushioned chairs beneath a tent-like roof. The middle floor houses the main dining section and, below, there are occasionally live acts. On the bottom floor, you might hear Brazilian, Portuguese or Angolan music. New Orleans trumpet player Nicholas Payton and Angolan musician Filipe Mukenga are among the artists to have entertained in this restaurant.
Reflecting Angola’s colonial past, the menu has French, Portuguese and Brazilian dishes. The restaurant’s strengths are dishes that use locally caught seafood and fish. In contrast, the meat is imported from South Africa and other countries.
“Of course, a restaurant like Bahi’a cannot be cheap,” said our driver, who describes the place as one of Luanda’s top restaurants. The city is expensive and most foreigners are not surprised that dishes cost between $30 and $40.
Not only can you eat a great meal at Bahi’a, it also captures some of the history and current contradictions of Angola. From the second floor — while enjoying lobster in a coconut milk sauce with slices of pineapple — I gazed out at the bright lights of cars waiting in a petrol queue at a station on the street below.
Angola’s wealth flows from its large oil reserves, which make it Africa’s second-biggest oil exporter, yet it still imports petrol.
This oil money has funded increasingly luxurious lifestyles among the upper echelons of the highly unequal Angolan society. As Angola’s citizens have gotten richer, they have joined the ranks of expatriates who initially formed the bulk of Espaço Bahi’a’s clientele, said Almeida, a short, well-built man with black hair neatly combed back.
In a conversation — which he said would only last five minutes, but carried on for an animated 20 — he told our party he decided to open the restaurant as the 30-year war was coming to an end. “At the time, it was a crazy thing,” he told us, gesticulating emphatically as he related his story.
His father was the first black Angolan to serve in the government before it received independence in 1975. After the war, they left for his mother’s home country of Portugal.
Almeida returned to Luanda, the city of his birth, in 1989, as things seemed to be changing. He first opened a bar, but in 2000 decided to open a restaurant in because, during the negotiations to end the war, there were no good places to eat.
Restaurants now sit cheek-by-jowl on the nearby peninsula called Ilha, but Bahi’a still stands out as an upscale retreat from the hot streets of Luanda.
Tumi Makgetla travelled to Angola with the recently launched English news network AlJazeera International for a documentary
The Restaurante Espaço Bahi’a can be found at Ave.4 de Fevereiro, Marginal, Luanda. Call 222 398 601 (from Angola)