More Drizzle than Dip, Thank you Zeus

One fine day towards the end of last year Nicky decided that after three and a half years of training our team of chefs to delight our guests’ taste buds, it was time to reshoot Angama Mara’s food for our new food gallery on our website.

It took Nicky all of 15 seconds to promptly inform me that there is only one person in the world she would want to shoot Angama Mara’s food, and that person was the talented Sam Linsell of Drizzle & Dip fame.

Daily Sam delights her blog and social media followers with the most gorgeous images of food, but more importantly than that, and what Nicky loves most about Sam’s blog, is how easy it is to cook her food. This fact speaks straight to the heart of Angama Mara’s style of cooking – our food is not fancy, it is good.

So, to fast track a long story, there I was sitting at Wilson Airport (with my toddler son in tow) meeting Sam and flying to the Mara in mid-December to run a food photoshoot. To say the week had a few challenges would be an understatement, because like with every other photoshoot I have ever run for Angama Mara, the weather god rolled in and started having fun.

I thought we were ‘safe’ from the weather being mid-December but how naïve I was, as for the last 5 years that I have worked for this company, never has the weather ever done what it was told to do. Especially when it comes to shoots.

Every time we were set up to capture some of the dishes the clouds rolled in (not always a bad thing for a photographer), then the mist, and then the rain, and all through this, Sam and our amazing team of chefs kept their cool and snapped away at one more beautiful plate of food after the other.

It got to the point on the shoot that I was simply sitting behind Sam while she clicked away at her camera, Whats’apping the Angama team about which dish was next up for grabs to be enjoyed straight off of the shoot’s table. Needless to add we ate ourselves into a gluttony-induced coma.

To say we put Sam under pressure would be an understatement. Nicky tasked us with 85 dishes in 5 days, and despite with the weather wreaking havoc we did it! The magnificent Angama Mara chefs, who when they started had never prepared a la carte dishes before, are now such dab hands, that our guests swoon when they are served our Swahili Chocolate Pots, smash a Best Burger in the Mara, or succumb to Tiramisini and Coffee Ice Cream. When it tastes even better than it looks, and this looks pretty good, who wouldn’t be?

Thank you, Sam, for a fun-filled week of laughter, stress, solutions and smiles, but most importantly for our beautiful new images of what our chefs at the lodge prepare each day for our guests.