It started with a wheelbarrow. A wheelbarrow filled with bread. A little boy, not yet 10 years old, is trudging through a village in what was then the Northern Transvaal pushing the wheelbarrow. His job, before he goes to school, is to sell his grandmother’s fresh little fire-baked loaves.

Give or take a couple of years, he graduates from wheelbarrow to bicycle for his bread round. Then at some point, a teenager now and still at school, gets himself a part-time job at the local veggie market. His tasks include making deliveries to factory canteens.

On his rounds he begins to learn about previously unfamiliar vegetables. Broccoli and cauliflower, for instance.

He also gets to see chefs at work in kitchens. He is intrigued. Fascinated.

He pushes for a part-time job as a kitchen hand.

The canteen manager notices his enthusiasm. Suggests he goes to hotel school. And so, at the end of Standard 8, the young man enrols at the Ga-Rankuwa Hotel School in Pretoria.

Fast-forward to the present.

Polokwane-born John Moatshe is probably the only chef in South Africa who has cooked for both President Nelson Mandela at his inauguration (the main table and the VIPs) and for the Queen of England (when she visited Durban in 1999).

Executive chef at Durban’s Inkosi Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre, he is the leader of a team of 30 full-time chefs plus around 15 trainee chefs and interns – not to forget support staff and “flexi-staff” when demand dictates – who work from the main ICC kitchen and 16 satellite kitchens connected via a veritable maze of tunnels that run beneath the halls and conference rooms.

John Moatshe at his stomping ground, Durban’s International Convention Centre. Photo: Wanda Hennig

It is not unusual for this unassuming, urbane, congenial man to oversee meals for 3,500 people in a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Some days there are two or three conferences or large corporate events happening simultaneously.

The array of characters he has wined and dined – he and his team serve up “hundreds of thousands of meals” a year – include heads of state, diplomats, international executives, entrepreneurs and academics, leading scientists, Nobel laureates, top-name entertainers. Maybe you, if you’ve ever attended an event at the ICC or adjoining Durban Exhibition Centre. Innovative, creative, experimental, resourceful, he is responsible for the recipes – devising and standardising them. The menus – ditto. The costings. Ultimately the taste, quality and consistency of every plate of food that is served.

I caught up with Moatshe most recently at the Durban Exhibition Centre having seen him listed as organiser of a culinary stage that would “create a platform to share agro-biodiversity and show the relationships between food and culture” at the city’s 2019 Articulate Africa Book and Art Fair.

In late 2017 Durban was designated Africa’s first (and only) Unesco City of Literature. Articulate Africa marked the city’s first formal celebration of this accolade. Gastronomy is one of Unesco’s creative city categories. Hence the inclusion of Moatshe’s food stage with its hands-on demos and cross-section of presenters. Next to a music stage. These alongside and interspersed with allocated areas, stages and platforms set aside for fine art, creative displays, performance art, craft kiosks, author pods and well-stocked pop-up versions of the city’s bookstores.

All showcased among an impressive and eclectic mix of author panels, speakers, presenters and more. To give an idea of the scope, I tracked down Moatshe, having just facilitated an author panel where a maverick Catholic priest, a psychic, a Buddhist meditation teacher, a Hari Krishna temple head and poet laureate Wally Serote – in is role of songoma/dingaka – had tackled the topic of self-actualisation and “finding inner peace in a crazy world”.

Six years ago Moatshe dressed me in a white coat, got me to put my hair under the regulation net, and showed me around the usually out-of-bounds kitchen complex. At the time he had just been awarded a Chaîne des Rôtisseurs blazon for maintaining “a superb level of cuisine, hospitality and service” at the ICC.

The Chaîne, for those who don’t know it (it’s much bigger in Europe than here), is an international gastronomic society founded in Paris in 1248. It has more than 25,000 members in 70-plus countries. It “promotes the art of fine cuisine and supports the development of young culinary professionals”, to quote from the website.

One of Moatshe’s two passions is developing young culinary professionals. This is the reason there are interns and trainee chefs on his team. He has a two-year programme for newly qualified young chefs. It works for them. They learn a lot. It works for him – not least the interchange of ideas and, he says, what he learns from them. Whenever possible, he creams off – keeps on – the best. And at any opportunity gives credit to his chefs. He urges me to make sure Chef Siyabonga Sithole, who recently moved to the ICC from the Beverly Hills hotel at Umhlanga on the KZN north coast, is in the picture when I pose Moatshe in front of the Articulate Africa demo stage.

Moatshe’s other passion, for which he was commended by Julie-May Ellingson, the ICC’s CEO when he was awarded that blazon? “Imparting his knowledge and his passion for African cuisine.”

John Moatshe’s decades of expertise show in his food. Photo: Wanda Hennig

For which he has both credentials and interest. Extending back to his bread-in-the-wheelbarrow days, which – don’t you think? – kind of put him in the category “early adopter” of what evolved into the modern food cart and mobile food truck trend.

Early career highlights before his move to the ICC and Durban included “rotating through all the kitchens, learning about all the cuisines” at Sun City in its heyday. There was a long stretch at Newmarket, Turffontein and Vaal race courses “getting experience in canteen environments”. On joining what was then the Bophuthatswana Parks Board, he became then-president Lucas Mangope’s personal chef. “I used to travel with him wherever he went.”

Back again at Sun City before the ICC, his focus was five-star dining. This included a stint learning the refinements of Italian cuisine at a cooking school in Cernobbio on Lake Como.

And he has continued to travel during his 21 years at the ICC, where he was a member of the founding (launch) team. Exchanges with other international convention centres. The Middle East, the Near East, the Far East. China, Malaysia, Australia. Trips to Sweden and Switzerland to learn first-hand about cutting-edge kitchen equipment used at places like the ICC that – wow, I’d never thought about this before – make it possible for servers to deliver more than 2,000 perfectly plated hot meals to seated guests inside of 10 minutes.

He has jetting around to judge cooking contests. He has travelled as an internationally acclaimed and innovative developer of nouvelle African cuisine.

More recently his focus when he goes on trips is often Africa, he tells me – Nigeria, the Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Senegal – to expand on this. Because Moatshe was developing and promoting African heritage cuisine – traditional foods infused with creative flair – long before African cuisine became trendy. Long before, for example, a woman in the US posted a 42-word tweet on a Friday morning to let her 400 Twitter followers know she was quitting her financial analyst job to open a Nigerian restaurant in San Francisco. Within a few hours the post had gone viral: retweeted 15,000 times, liked nearly 60,000 times. Her follower count had jumped to more than 2,400.

Long before Slow Food International, once considered an elitist – if worthy – organisation, shifted its focus to grassroots producers, indigenous people, migrants, traditions lost to colonialism and the like. With founder Carlo Petrini in 2018 calling for the continued development of African cuisine and saying: “I want African chefs to be proud of their food. You must serve food from your country.”

Moatshe has been ahead of the curve in this surge. Putting items like “lamb shank, oxtail, tripe, samp and beans, wild spinach on the menu”. Tweaking it. Refining it. Serving it alongside other international cuisines at the ICC. “Giving international delegates at big conferences a chance to experience our heritage” alongside authentic flavours and dishes they might otherwise be missing from back home.

Chatting to him this time, the subject of the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs comes up again. This time a Chaîne induction gala dinner prepared by Moatshe and his team and hosted, in late February, by the ICC.

Fellow Durban chef Shaun Munro is bailli (head) of the KZN Chaîne chapter. Having heard reports of it having being a splendid event, I asked Munro for feedback.

“Moatshe is probably Durban’s most influential chef – some would say iconic,” he says. “It’s wonderful to see a home-grown man doing things ‘his way’. Being a leader with no big ego. He bridges gaps. He’s been at the ICC since it opened and it’s remarkable how he has stayed abreast, stayed current. Kept up with clever menus, catering for people from around the globe.

“The evidence of excellence of John and his team – and he surrounds himself with good people, which is the mark of a leader – is on the plate. Our dinner was a cracker of a meal and the service was fantastic.”

Inspiration on a plate. Seems we can thank his grandmother for that daily bread. DM

Wanda Hennig is a food and travel writer, based in Durban, who lived and wrote from San Francisco for 20+ years. She is author of Cravings: A Zen-inspired memoir about sensual pleasures, freedom from dark places and living and eating with abandon (Say Yes Press, 2017). Reach her online via her website, Wandalust Online