The country where you don’t wear a rolex — you eat it

By Griffin Shea, CNN

Kampala (CNN) — When Emmanuel Jonathan Okello decided to open a restaurant, he knew exactly what the menu would include: Rolexes.

“There’s a common saying; in Uganda, we don’t wear the Rolex. We eat the rolex,” he said.

Now a national dish in the East African country, and beyond, the humble street food takes its name, says Okello, from the simple way it was constructed from eggs and Indian chapati bread.

“Rolex is mainly a word that was coined from rolled egg,” he said. “The first people to make it, they picked up the chapati that was originally made by the Indians and then began to put the omelet in. But they rolled it whenever they served it. So, for lack of a better word, many people call it rolex — you know, rolled eggs.”

The chapatis arrived with Indians, brought in by the British to build the railways at the turn of the last century. Indian food became especially popular in Busoga, near the Kenyan border. As Ugandans adopted the chapati as their own, they made it slightly softer, with a crispier edge.

Some would argue that it’s closer to paratha — an Indian flatbread — but the essentials are the same: wheat flour, salt, warm water, and a little oil. The dough is rolled into a ball and then flattened on a round griddle like a crepe pan.

What started as cheap eats for laborers in the east of the country has found its way into every market in Uganda, and migrated onto trendy café plates and even into rooftop fine dining in other countries.

The leap from regional street food to national dish was largely driven by students. Rolexes on the street cost about 20 US cents, perfect for a university student budget and filling enough to get them through the day.

That’s how Okello discovered rolexes and fell in love with them.

‘We could do anything’

In their most basic and traditional form, the eggs are scrambled and then cooked into a thin omelet, almost like a crepe in thickness. The omelet gets flipped onto the chapati, some cabbage and tomatoes are sprinkled over it, and then it’s all rolled together in a wrap.

Okello’s revelation came on a trip to Jinja, a tourist town near the source of the Nile, where he met a street vendor who added fried tripe to the fillings.

“And it tasted very well for me,” he said. “That’s when I thought we could do anything with the rolex. So, I sat down and began writing down what we would have in a rolex.”

Before long, he’d scribbled down a couple dozen combinations: rolex with beef sausage, chicken gravy, curry, bacon, avocados, minced beef — every possible combination.

Can’t decide? His restaurant offers a Chef’s Special, basically an everything-rolex.

“There was a moment we even had a rolex with fruits in it,” he said. “It didn’t settle well with many people because Ugandans are not really experimental with food and so we took it off. But we had some people who liked it.”

His restaurant, aptly named The Rolex Guy, fills a gap in the market. A step up from street vendors, but not as pricey as the white tablecloth restaurants. His top-of-the-line everything rolex goes for about $5.50. Now he has two branches, one in Uganda’s capital Kampala, and one in Entebbe, a city to the south. A delivery service covers everywhere in between.

National passion

Author Jonathan Kabugo has written an entire cookbook called, “How to Rolex,” in which he offers his own variations.

For him, the rolex brought enormous innovation to Ugandan cuisine. Traditionally, most Ugandan food involved a meat or vegetable cooked in a sauce and then served with a heap of carbs like tubers or plantains. Regional food within the country offers exquisite variety.

The north adds a peanut sauce to bring out the smokiness of their meats. Luwombo stews are cooked inside banana leaves over an open flame, pulling the smoke into the aromatic leaves — basically slow cooking the ingredients over a grill.

The rolex made things easier, literally rolling everything into one handheld meal. That’s part of why it became so popular with students at Makerere University in Kampala in the 1990s. That loyal fan base ignited a national passion.

“So, it’s easy, it’s quick, it’s convenient. It also doesn’t require exceptional expertise to prepare,” Kabugo said. “It enables a lot of young boys to get into business and find a way to support themselves and make something meaningful of their efforts.”

And the rolex evolves as Ugandan culture changes. Kampala has a large Ethiopian and Eritrean community. They’ve started making rolexes with shiro, the creamy spiced stew made from powdered chickpeas or broad beans that’s a cornerstone of cooking in those countries.

60 million people can’t be wrong

At the trendy Endiro Coffee, the menu offers a rolex that’s a take on a Greek salad, with sun-dried tomatoes, olives, spinach and feta.

Meanwhile, Okello is experimenting with a rolex pizza, where the chapati is chopped up and mixed with the eggs to form the crust.

The dish has spilled out across East Africa, where you can find vendors offering rolexes in Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi. But it’s in Uganda where rolexes have become a de facto national dish.

“There is nothing that says Ugandan cuisine more than rolex,” said Fathi “Chef Coco” Reinarhz. Born in Burundi, and raised in Belgium, he created a menu at his rooftop Epicure Restaurant in Johannesburg that pulls from cuisine across Africa. For his version of a rolex, the eggs are boiled and then grated and folded into a curried minced meat. That’s rolled up in a chapati to create the rolex look.

“I always say, Epicure, I don’t have a menu here. It’s a culinary journey that I share with the customers who come here, where we take you, where we give you news of Africa,” he said. “You really have to have the rolex if you want to do the food from that region. It’s like having an Italian restaurant and no pizza, you know, or no pasta.”

As for the possible confusion with the luxury watches, Kabugo says there’s no turning back from Ugandans using the name rolex.

“It’s 60 million people, what will you do?” he said. “I think they should be flattered that the name was taken up like that.”

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