Francis Mallmann at the fire with Deborah Calmeyer

For five nights in Botswana's Okavango Delta at Xigera, you will not simply eat and watch Francis prepare the continent’s finest ingredients in a variety of settings. You will stand beside him, cook with him, go on walks, boats and game drives with him. Talking, laughing and learning from him. As he said to me: “Deborah, life is a mystery to be lived, not a puzzle to be solved.” I love those words and have carried them with me since our walk out on the Okavango plains in May. I could listen to him for hours sitting beneath the African sky.

I have spent my life understanding Africa: its rhythm, its light, its silences, its complexity and the exacting judgment required to reveal my home continent in the most compelling of ways. It’s my great privilege to share it with others. Francis has spent more than three decades mastering fire, he will now share his skill in Africa with us. Two forms of mastery, together at the intersection of stillness and indulgence — imbued with all the details, the care, the comfort and the insider access that defines ROAR AFRICA.

A Feast for the Senses

Salt,heat,flame and time

Food tastes different in the wild. Hunger is deeper. Scent is stronger, like the wildly aromatic, sun-baked Okavango sage that wafts through the air. Smoke carries differently. Salt, citrus, fat, heat and flame register more deeply when there are elephants moving through the floodplain, fish eagles calling across the sky and the last light of day turning the Delta gold.

To be with Francis at the fire is to enter a different relationship with food, one governed not by timers and recipes, but by instinct, restraint, heat, smoke, patience and appetite. In the wild, nothing tastes polite. Everything is more alive, more amplified. Hunger becomes more primal after a day lived outside…on water, in wind, under sky, among animals, silence and unfathomable natural beauty. Citrus cuts sharper. Salt is saltier. Meat takes on the crisp, charred memory of flame. Vegetables blister and sweeten over the coals. Bread tears open warm in the hand. Wine tastes richer, silkier on the palate beneath the stars.

Immerse into Xigera

Where art, architecture, and the untamed wild meet

Our setting is Xigera Safari Lodge, on Paradise Island in Botswana's Moremi Game Reserve. Easily one of Africa's most extraordinary lodges, suspended between water, wilderness, art and sky, it is really a living gallery of African art and design.

Morning game drives, followed by surprise bush breakfasts, long lunches beneath jackalberry trees. Sunset dinners set deep in the bush, precisely where the light is right, the air has softened, and the fire can begin to crackle as dusk gathers around you. Ingredients will be prepared over open flame, paired with wines chosen by Francis, and served at tables designed with the same care as the meal itself. Here, you see Africa’s creativity unfold across sculptural ceramics, richly colorful textiles, bowls of lemons atop 200-year-old French linen.

The ROAR Africa difference

Expertise, access and generational knowledge

This is my Africa. A tapestry of cultures and landscapes interpreted through a lifetime of knowing what most people miss. Africa at this level requires taste, instinct, relationships, timing and the confidence to leave space for the wild to do what it does best. The beauty is not in doing more. It is in knowing exactly what belongs — and what does not.

Francis Mallmann has cooked with fire all over the world. But never like this, in a setting so rare, for so few guests.

"A basin of water with the chance to gather around an open fire and indulge in stillness, space and presence - the endangered species of our time." - Deborah Calmeyer

This is the rarest kind of luxury: not more, but exactly right. Twenty seats. Five nights. Francis at the fire. Africa all around you.