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This review was written for Johannesburg In Your Pocket by Ryan Enslin.
Where presence is the itinerary
I arrived with city habits still buzzing under the skin. Babirwa answered with hush: the scratch of a Crested Francolin in the grass, the day easing itself into evening, and the sense, rare and necessary, that nothing needed proving. This isn’t a place for lists or tallies. It’s a place where presence is the itinerary.
Mornings open gently. The air holds the cool of night; the bush wakes by degrees. Coffee tastes different when the first thing you hear is wind moving through the new leaves of a Mopane tree. Midday invites shade, a dip in the pool, or quiet hours up at the Club House, the lodge’s social heart. Here, a long, deep veranda stretches towards the bush with views of the Babirwa golf course, its deep chairs and easy hospitality inviting slow afternoons. Perhaps a cocktail from the bar, perhaps silence. It’s a space that bridges the stillness of the bush with the simple pleasure of being unhurried.
As the sun lowers, a time-honoured ritual unfolds. Sundowners in the bush. No fanfare, just a quiet pour between the trees while the landscape turns the colour of embers. It’s the kind of moment that steadies you.
Rooms that listen to the land
The suites are composed rather than showy: generous beds, light falling where it should, textures that feel honest to place. There’s a kind of restraint here that I read as care, the confidence to leave space for the surrounds to speak. For two people needing to reset, or a small circle of friends wanting to reconnect without the static of elsewhere, this spareness is the point. When the world is pared back, you begin to hear your own life again.
A culinary journey rooted in tradition
But it is at the table where I discover Babirwa tells another kind of story, one woven from the threads of traditional African cooking. Under the hands of Chef Lizzy Taolela, who has been with the lodge for nearly a decade, food becomes both sustenance and narrative.Taolela speaks about food with a quiet certainty, shaped by years of experience and the memories of her upbringing. One of her favourite dishes, prepared during my stay, is hard body chicken. For many, this bird represents the heart of traditional African cooking: slower to tender, richer in flavour, demanding time and patience. “You cook it with love,” Taolela shares with me, “because it asks you to slow down. And when you slow down, you taste more.”
The chicken was prepared using a Terra Firma Dining fire-pit installation, a concept that reimagines fire cooking in ways that are both primal and refined. Suspended over the open flame, the bird absorbed smoke and time in equal measure, transforming into something elemental. This was not fine dining in the European sense; it was something deeper, an honouring of African traditions, given new form through fire.
Echoes from the hearth
Inspiration for Babirwa’s food philosophy can be traced to the continent’s oldest kitchens. Traditional African cooking has always been about more than ingredients; it is about fire, patience, and the act of gathering. Clay pots, pounded grains, and stews shared from a communal bowl, each a vessel of memory and method. At Babirwa, those echoes are given contemporary presence.
Taolela’s meals draw on the familiar – maize meal, stewed vegetables, slow-cooked meats – but are presented in ways that celebrate both origin and place. Even pizza, made in the lodge’s greenhouse, carries the story forward: dough rising in plant-scented warmth, toppings leaning local.
In a country where dining often borrows from elsewhere, Taolela’s kitchen quietly restores balance; rooting refinement in heritage, not imitation. Dining here feels participatory, as though one joins a lineage rather than merely eats a meal. Each dish gestures to the hearths of generations past and to the enduring African truth that food binds more than it fills.
Fire, story, and togetherness
What lingers from meals at Babirwa is not only the taste, but the experience of gathering. Around the fire, as the day’s light slips away, I find myself drawn into conversation and laughter with fellow guests, the food acting as a bridge. Taolela’s hard body chicken carries the tang of smoke, the resilience of the bird, and the warmth of its making. Paired with vegetables grown nearby and bread baked with careful attention, it is a meal that insists on presence.This patient, elemental approach to food mirrors the rhythm of the lodge itself. Just as Babirwa encourages you to step back from the haste of urban life, its meals ask you to taste deeply and to connect.
Returning to rhythm
Between meals, Babirwa gives you back to the land. Paths call for a meander or a cycle for the more adventurous. Shade gathers under broad crowns. In the evening, the sky skins itself of colour and constellations appear with a clarity that feels instructive. There’s a particular silence after dark here, alive, not empty, that untangles the day’s thoughts and sets them down, orderly, on the table.
Somewhere between the morning coffee and the evening fire, the noise of my city life receded. What filled its place wasn’t silence, but proportion. By my last morning, my breathing had changed. Not metaphorically, literally. A longer inhale, a steadier release. I had come looking for distance and found scale instead: the sense that life is both vast and manageable, that you can hold it again if you slow your fork and your step.
The gift of Babirwa
Babirwa’s gift lies precisely there. Near enough to reach without fuss, far enough to reorient the compass. For couples or close friends seeking days unhurried and true, it offers a way back to rhythm. The careful making of a meal, the reliable theatre of evening light, the quiet certainty that less, when well-tended, can be more.
On the road home, the city rose before me, as it always does. But the Waterberg travelled back with me, its long exhale somewhere inside my own breathing, its cadence folded quietly into the day ahead. The taste of smoke lingered behind the tongue, carrying the reminder that fire, patience, and good company remain the oldest technologies we have for living well.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan Enslin is a friend of Johannesburg In Your Pocket with a way of seeing the world that feels quietly attentive. He had his start in chartered accounting before pursuing travel, photography, and writing. His work carries a sense of wonder, shaped by moments he's gathered across the globe, while remaining rooted in Joburg. For a deeper look into his journeys, his website offers the full sweep of his writing and photography, and his Instagram @my_lime_boots captures the smaller details.
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