What’s old and new at the 44 Stanley precinct

Clemens Faber’s own filled pasta favourite salmon girasole. (Photo: Supplied)

By Marie-Lais Emond

12 Aug 2022

At 44 Stanley there’s an ever-fresh, ever-interesting array of local fooderies studded among special shops and galleries.

The food enclave we know and love as 44 Stanley will be 20 in 2023. So it’s almost two whole decades ago that ex-surfer boy Brian Green looked over the old 1930s-built AA testing grounds and buildings and then transformed them all into an enclave of ever-interesting shops, cafes and galleries, always with a happy emphasis on local people, providers, and provender. He’s good at this vision-and-development business, having done something as unusual since, at the Victoria Yards across town.

Today, 44 Stanley includes two Jozi by-now vittles classics like the Salvation Cafe and the first ever (and by far the nicest) Bean There coffee roastery in the land. Perhaps Chocoloza has become a classic by now too. And there are six new and newish places worth exploring, which is what I’m about.

This sort of open development is the antidote to malls and everything-under-one-roof-including-your-car shopping centres. No you can’t park the car under 44 Stanley. There’s more to life. There are plenty of other places to park, like an open car park or in the surrounding streets, where the car guards are part of the local social urban solutions. This Jozi enclave manages to seem ever-fresh, due to Green’s organising and choosing of interesting tenants. I’m determined not to say “curating”. The place has fascinating little shops, unusually nice food places, all special, except for Bean There now, to Jozi.

There are two main entrances to 44, in Stanley Avenue, which is in a funny triangular place on the city map, called Braamfontein Werf. It borders Auckland Park, Parktown and Braamfontein and many just refer to it as Milpark.

I’m through the entrance closest to Owl Street (Don’t Hoot!). SA fashion and lifestyle shop Lunar is on this corner. Up the wide walkway, passing Voisin and Ici, there’s a film crew busy today, booms and all. I’ll be returning specially for these two linked places. So, at the T junction of the walkway, I turn left, past the bookshop, L’Elephant Terrible and left again. This is where I want my first coffee of the day, at Bean There.

The first ever Bean There coffee roastery in the land. (Photo: Brandon Hinton)

As we know by now, this is the fairest of Africa’s Fair Trade coffee sourcers, roasters and makers. It’s a place where a mere cappuccino has meaning and the phenomenally smoothe oily texture and taste of just-roasted beans. What is it this morning? Burundian. My coffee fanatic friend, Kennedy Welani Tambo, is raving about the Olga’s Reserve VIII now available as well, an Ethiopian from a small village called Guji.

Things have been moved around a bit since I was last here, so that the counter is now a central island. A favourite little creeper-clad courtyard remains lovely for lolling in the sunshine. The new wall menu includes coffees made in various ways, as in Aero and French presses, pour-overs dripped through a Hario v60 or a Chemex. All the equipment is for sale too and I tend to forget that they do affogato. On warm days it’s also a delicious idea to drink Cold Brews and tonic in the courtyard.

It’s an easy thing to move from here to the Salvation Café, one of the places where real poached eggs used to impress me madly in the days when restaurants and cafés used to steam them in “poaching” pans. It also won me over for having a real chef then. It still has. It’s Claudia Giannoccaro and her husband, Remko, who is front of house.

Now the thing to do here is to sit out, near the little circular dam and have the famous and fabulous eggy brunches. Or sit in the restaurant itself or on the raised stoep. The coffee is also good so another cup won’t go amiss. I do all these things a lot and love them so today, instead, I’m going over to the far side of 44, to the area next to the other entrance.

I’m at a place called Even After All, the name loaded with potential meaning and lyrics, most of them hinting at nocturnal ones. It’s a kind of modern take of a diner and is open from brunch time till who knows when. I make myself comfortable under a pink neon flying duck on the wall, one of three of course. I love these and used to have a ridiculous collection of old flying ducks once, in plaster, ceramic, metals, not neon. It’s a big space with the bar at one end and these cool banquettes down this part, against 70s or 80s green and orange wallpaper.

I’ve noticed people sit here with their laptops all morning. They could stay all the way through lunch and on into the afternoon and evening for cocktails and drinks. Meantime, here’s a great menu of brunches.

Mine is poached eggs as a Green Benedict, chosen because the falafel rösti under the eggs sounded interesting and they are, along with the perfectly runny yolks. A Green Goddess version of hollandaise trails over the lot. It’s exceedingly green.

I pass up a breakfast cocktail or even a mimosa made with prosecco but I do note the presence of fresh herbs and other fresh fruit contents on the cocktail list, as on the food menu. I liked the sound of Something Basil with Bombay Sapphire, fresh lemon juice and basil leaves. Oops, more green. I see many of the wines are no-sulphur or organic.

From here on, I want to make some kind of tour sense of all the food spots but, as I leave, I realise Peachy is going to have to be for later in the day. I would really like to see or try some of their small plates and at least one cocktail. They have a few breakfasts, nowhere near as many as Even After All, and lunches or snacks of the tapas variety. And it looks pretty, the logo sundae style.

Meantime, around the corner, on the olive tree piazza, I stop for a chat with Russell Grant who runs the Bioscope that moved from Maboneng in pre-Covid days. His premises are bigger and better here, more open with a shop of movie collectables too, though the movie house itself is small and rather functionally cool. I mention what I’m doing today.

Gingerbread specially made for the Bioscope. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

“Have you been into our little restaurant? It is one,” he says. It can be used without or in conjunction with movies, known as they are, anyway, for being shown with take-in drinks and pizzas, noodles or whatever’s relevant to the showing. “A German friend makes this gingerbead specially for us,” he adds when he sees my delight at the confectionery.

Across the popular piazza and little fountains is what purports to be a Northern Italian restaurant, La Pergola, very attractive. Here’s a map on which I try to find the northern area I know best, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and notice this map has cities in the provinces. So I’d be looking around Trieste, above Venice and next to Trento if it were on the map. Turin, Milan and Bologna are. Among the other sections of La Pergola’s menu are pasta, not normally much of a great northern favourite carb, and pizza which is not from anywhere there really. I start to pick out the more northern options that I know.

Attractive La Pergola, named after Rome’s finest restaurant that the owner admired in his early youth. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

While I eat some rather exquisite spinach and ricotta ravioli, nibbling a block rather than a slice of utterly deliciously granular bread made by the pizza maker in his oven, it occurs to me that I can enjoy this place more if I put aside all my petty ideologies about Italian food in another country. I warm to Clemens Faber this way.

He’s Austrian, having lived in Italy, fond of food that easily crossed the Italian borders to and from Austria, Germany, even France. And he loves, loves, loves to make pasta, especially filled pasta. That’s what he does every day in the kitchen here. His favourite and the one his patrons keep coming back for is salmon girasole. But, well, he had a pizza oven here already so he makes pretty good pizza too and he’s always liked the lovely location. Even when he was visiting from Zanzibar and used to eat here, sitting outdoors on the sunny piazza which is largely La Pergola’s now.

Clemens Faber’s own filled pasta favourite salmon girasole. (Photo: Supplied)

I have an idea for dessert after an Italian meal. Just a few doors away, down the corridor, is Forest Gelato, offering the gelato made with fresh fruit and own-garden herbs, by Candice Harrison-Train. Of eight current flavours, I settle for orange and Szechuan and pepper. As summer moves in, her flavours will involve more blueberries and strawberries, like now, and then peaches, apricots, mangoes, plums and, finally, figs. Her herbs are basil, lemongrass, myrtle and rosemary.

The name has a romantic “long ago” beginning from when Candice stayed in a beautiful 12th century Tuscan convent converted into a villa. “Just when I thought things could not get more beautiful, I stepped outside to find the forest alight with thousands of fireflies. ‘Forest’ is resonant of that little spark of joy.”

Equally good for pud would have been another favourite of mine, round another little outdoor corner. Chocoloza, organic handmade chocolates, as African in every way as possible, are created by Vicky Baine, by far the most qualified chocolatiere that I know, and I’ve been meeting some.

The place looks different and I do like the new chocolate lounge for drinking any of the lip-lickingly superb hot chocolates and sometimes cold ones in summer. It’s good too for chomping chocs at little tables from easy chairs, instead of rushing your box of choices home to gobble, trying not to eat them en route. Today there’s no marzipan choc but there are the fabulous local granadilla and real white chocolates, Passion and also Madagascan Marble in among so many other disturbing temptations.

I return in the late afternoon three days later and go straight to Peachy (“We Are So Peachy”). The peachy, couchy and soft armchair spaces are mostly taken up, even the long pastel tables have people on laptops with drinks at them.

I tuck myself into a soft corner and have no trouble with the cocktail list, which observes that the cocktails are “simple but not stupid”, three of which include peaches. Mine is a prosecco bellini, as peachy as first constructed by Giusappo Cipriani in the late 40s.

To try to keep to some relevant theme, I order a small plate of what turn out to be giant arancini, called Shroom Arancini. I see the afternoon out in tasty style, the slightly garlicked mushroom mixture surrounding molten Gruyère and my bellini surprising me with its vintage tang of deliciousness.

So I catch up with 44 Stanley updating itself all the time, ending my week with yet another discovery. I have not yet finished. There’s more to come. But it’s perfect for now, for this pale sunset-lit afternoon, fine flute in hand. DM/TGIFood

Bean There 087 310 3100

Salvation Cafe 011 482 7795

Even After All 078 582 8233

Bioscope 061 900 4457

La Pergola 087 110 0626

Forest Gelato 987 808 0438

Chocoloza 010 900 4892

Peachy 063 210 3599

The writer supports Nosh Food Rescue, an NGO that helps Jozi feeding schemes with food ‘rescued’ from the food chain. Please support them here.

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