In early May, twenty-two guests sat down at a table in Norfolk, Virginia, surrounded by glass sculpture, to eat food from southern Africa. Biltong croquettes came first. Steamed mealie bread followed, then umngqusho, crushed maize and sugar beans, served with risotto. Later came bobotie made with duck, springbok with charred corn, a tangerine sorbet, and malva pudding. The wines were mostly from the Western Cape. Tickets were $150.
The man cooking was Tichafa Chingombe, executive chef at Glass Light Hotel & Gallery since 2024. He was born in Zimbabwe and grew up through the country’s economic crisis. When he was 13, his parents went to South Africa to work, and he stayed behind to look after his younger siblings. At 16 he joined them in Khayelitsha, outside Cape Town. There was no money for school.
He went looking for a kitchen instead. At Fountains Hotel, known for its large buffets, he asked for work and was taken on unpaid. “The only thing I had to offer was my hard work,” he told Coastal Virginia Magazine. A chef there built a training programme around him. Fine dining followed at Beluga and then La Mouette, where he learned tasting menus. After that came two years as private chef to the ruler of an emirate in the UAE. “Excellence was not optional,” he said of that job.
He met his wife, Olivia, at a hotel in Savannah, and the couple later moved to Florida, where he cooked under mentors including Fabio Viviani. When Olivia became pregnant, they left Fort Lauderdale and he took the job in Norfolk.
The dinner, called “A Taste of Home”, grew out of a wine rep’s suggestion and Chingombe’s own appetite for it. Each course had a source. The biltong croquettes came from how his family kept meat without electricity. The mealie bread was the snack his mother packed for school. Of the bobotie he said, “This taste is my GPS.” The springbok went back to hunting as a boy.
The malva pudding has gone onto the regular menu, and other dishes from the evening may follow as specials.
For readers in the diaspora, the story will sound familiar: a childhood split across borders, work found by asking, and a table at which home gets cooked again somewhere new.
Sources: Marisa Marsey, “A Taste of Home…and Here,” Coastal Virginia Magazine, 2026. Glass Light Norfolk (Instagram).
