Bunny chow love, Durban’s unique culinary gift to the world

Please, folks of Jozi, let’s make love and not war. We have no desire to capture your kota. By the same half-a-scooped-out-loaf token, you’re not currying favour — let alone flavour — with anyone here in Durbs by muscling in on our bunny chow heritage, tradition and exalted, if a tad eccentric, culinary gift to the world.

For any bunny chow lover wondering what baloney would impel a person to mention the beloved Durban bunny and its four-letter-word bread-Russian-polony-cheese-what-have-you offshoot in the same breath, you must have missed the K*K COOK’s TGIFood article of two weeks ago titled Bunny Chow Vs Kota – who owns it, Soweto or Durban?

The story continues: “There has been a raging debate about the origins of the bunny chow, also known as kota… depending on which part of South Africa you live in or come from.”

Not to rabbit on and get into a curry spat. But no, bud. No raging debate. This here, the preferred city of discerning South Africans (that you need to be intrepid, too, to live here goes without saying), is bunny country. And bunny chow is bunny chow. There is no raging debate, or even a poetically tranquil murmuring, suggesting the bunny chow has ever been, or will ever be, a kota. Or that any place other than Durban “owns” it, seeing we’re being exclusionary.

There is, indeed, ongoing debate, at times raging, about the whys and wherefores of the bunny chow, which dates back to the 1940s. Maybe earlier. There is also ongoing debate, often raging, about the merits of a good vs mediocre bunny. Whether Durban curry is essential. (Not always possible.) And there is much discourse of an international nature as to where in the world one can get the equivalent of a good Durban curry served up as a bunny.

But the kota? Until that article, no debate. Put that between the polony slices in your Dagwood, which reading the “sandwich tribunal” on the kota, seems an apt description. Then relish it, smoke it, or do whatever else you choose to do with it.

“Durban gave birth to a unique dish, the bunny chow,” Ashwin Desai, a professor of sociology at the University of Johannesburg, and Goolam Vahad, a professor of history at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, wrote in a chapter titled The Bunny Chow: An Immaculate Conception in their book Durban’s Casbah: Bunny Chows, Bolsheviks and Bioscopes (UKZN Press, 2023).  

“As inventive as it was simple, a bunny chow comprises a quarter or half a loaf of bread with the centre neatly scooped out and filled with a saucy curry, which historically was beans. The thick crust forms the bowl and the scooped-out core of the loaf is used as the ladle with which the hearty insides are put into one’s mouth… There is no fixed recipe beyond the structure of the dish: bread outside, stinging curry inside.”

The authors even share a lesson in how to eat a bunny chow, which their quoted source, writer-researcher Minal Hajratwala, calls “another trick altogether”… And who after her step-by-step instructions observes: “At a modern bunny chow joint, Africans of all colours can be seen chowing down. Watching them, black, brown, and white, it is easy to forget that the bunny chow was born of segregation — South Africa’s extreme and relentless version of it.”

My Happy Chappy DIY mutton bunny, packed deconstructed, ready to warm, assemble, heat and eat at home. (Photo: Wanda Hennig)

• “Kota/sphatlo can be compared to a burger. Bunny chow is an art. Taste, colour, curry quality in perfect balance make a bunny. You make a mistake with one, then it’s no longer a bunny, just bread and curry. Bunny is Da Vinci art.”


• “There’s no way you can think of bunny chow and kota as the same. Like saying a hot dog and a hamburger are the same ’cos they come in a bun.”


• “Bunny chow’s old history is that it was a lunch box for fishermen/sugarcane workers many years ago. All bunny lovers know that a good bunny must have a good amount of gravy, be aromatic, flavourful and the potatoes must be soft. One could have exactly the same curry with sliced bread or rice, but that is not a bunny.”


• “Calling a bunny chow a kota is like calling a chip chow a bunny chow. A chip chow is a quarter bread filled with chips with curry gravy poured on top. Like Test cricket is to T20 cricket.”

• “The kota derives from the bunny chow. One is elite and the other pretty average.”


• A bunny is a bunny. A kota is a kota. A bunny (or bania) chow is a special meal created many moons ago with its own special place in food history. If you’re going to call a kota a bunny chow, you may as well call a shawarma a bunny, too.”

A bunny chow is not a kota and Durban is the bunny’s ancestral home. (Photo: Wanda Hennig)