The Jozi year of eating in and closing down

The finest truffles of Europe are being developed in Jozi’s sister city by two young, blonde scientists. (Photo: Mustérion)

By Marie-Lais Emond

18 Dec 2020

The typically buzzing tables of Joburg’s restaurant scene have been quiet in 2020 with many businesses closing their doors for good. But new leaves are unfurling, offering signs of hope for the foodies of Jozi.

We were looking at the future, the food of the future, even turning over new leaves in the January of 2020. In the Future Africa gardens on the campus of Pretoria University it was becoming apparent that the seeds of our new foods that can ensure food security have been around since ancient African days.

Doctoral chef Hennie Fisher, among the leaves in Future Africa gardens, also responsible for the subsequent inspiration dinner. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

The Future Africa faculty went on to hold a dinner maybe seven weeks later, at which Jozi chefs, among others in Gauteng, were inspired to consider our very own future cuisine, as on the menu. It was also the occasion where we shook hands and kissed each others’ cheeks for the very last time.

Before masks too, in February 2020, was the fabulous to-be-monthly Pic(nique)Chic, held by Chef Coco Reinahrz, in the gardens of his Epicure restaurant in Morningside, where the menu explored traditional and modern African cuisines and, wow, there were hats galore. The March 2020 one was never held, of course. Epicure is still closed.

And then there was the pandemic. Many Jozi restaurants looked at it in a sanguine, even philosophical way and then they didn’t. Early on David Higgs and company’s Marble and Saint closed, saying they were positively contributing to the slowing of the pandemic. Then there was guilt felt by others (“We are open. We probably shouldn’t be” – Farro) and they began folding like cards. Some have never reopened even though there were collections and there were no collections, deliveries and no deliveries, wines and no wines.

The staff were sent home and restaurants begged to help pay their salaries. No one was too proud. They did whatever was okay that week and then tailored it to whatever was okay the next week. Some bootlegging was evident. Masked, of course.

By April we were scarcely leaving our Jozi homes, wondering why all the eggs and pasta in supermarkets were gone when we made our ways there in masks and panic. We found ways to use the unpopular pastas that were left. In colder May we realised some of the comforting tinned stuff we liked most was already part of our heritage.

It also struck us that barista’s barista, Lovejoy Chirambasukwa, who taught world barista champs was also locked away from Jozi’s Craft Coffee and that, via Zoom, we could extract from him all the coffee information we needed to make our best coffees ever, even under lockdown.

It was the time of the poignant photograph of a completely emptied and bleak 7th Street in Melville that had, until recently been one of South Africa’s most popular food nodes with 37 restaurants over three blocks. There were just clouds and Ziggy the cat passing.

We looked at more ways of introducing some excitement into our already rather tired one pot or pasta dishes and discovered that magic ingredients like miso were still deliverable to us in Jozi to help us rev up even lockdown baked beans on toast. We also set about using the banana peels from all that banana bread. A new thriftiness and green consciousness had us using pips, too, from what we’d become used to turfing in urban Jozi.

It appeared that a chink in the Jozi bylaws meant we could actually go out to a roadhouse and have food delivered to us cocooned in our vehicles. We hurriedly set out on the coldest night of the year, even though the cops saw it as an illegal gathering and closed the place down that night, Molly Malone’s was allowed to open the very next week, quite legally.

A chink in the Jozi bylaws meant we could test drive out to a roadhouse and have food delivered through the car window. (Photo: Molly Malone’s)

On 22 July 2020 we got in there with the restaurants and their workers’ plights, did our placard-carrying from Jozi restaurant area to area, Bryanston, Linden, Melville and Parkhurst.

In August we went out to our first real restaurant for a real dinner, at Modena in Parkview. There was the strangeness of all the super-sanitising and also a real curfew. We had to dash back weirdly early after a frenzy of ordering excitement.

Spring brought out Lientjie Wessels’ book Geure and a garden lunch adventure not too far from the Big Smoke. September also found us taste-testing the snails farmed by Stan’s Snails “just over there” in Benoni that prime Jozi restaurants serve.

In October we revealed the sad part about the plethora of Jozi’s small gardening projects on high rooftops, plots and in parks: there was no market for all that beautiful produce.

We also looked at how extraordinarily some restaurateurs had used their lockdowns, to think up quite bizarre plans for their futures, with intriguing effects.

November saw Jozi’s first new places opening up, led by Moeng in Rosebank, an own-local, traditional restaurant with a fine-dining edge and personalised presentation. Sleepy Blairgowrie woke up to a whole Delta Centre full of interesting new fooderies, with more buzzing on the periphery. Pop-ups dramatically became a thing all over Jozi and remain so, bringing back great and favourite chefs into our orbits, if for brief periods.

In November we also discovered the wonderful secret that the finest truffles of Europe are being developed in our sister city, Pretoria by two young, food-smitten blonde scientists.

The finest truffles of Europe are being developed in Jozi’s sister city by two young, blonde scientists. (Photo: Mustérion)

At the end of the year we wondered why Jozi people are the ones that eat out so enthusiastically, even distanced and masked. It was cheering, as was wondering for a while if the perfect burrata could be Christmas fare and celebrating the fact that a small, artisanal company in Jozi, called Curds and Whey could be so very good at it.

It is time to be turning over more and more exciting leaves of the future again, the future of Jozi’s 2021 as food. DM/TGIFood

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