Offbeat Eats

Both on our outbound trip and returning trip, we tried to get reservations at Marble, which is considered one of the best restaurants in South Africa, and were not able to secure at table. On our last evening in South Africa, however, we got lucky and I managed to secure a 7pm reservation, so we found ourselves heading out to the Keyes Art Mile, a part of Johannesburg’s Rosebank neighbor known as a newer restaurant and gallery district.

Soon enough, we found ourselves heading back to the King Shaka International Airport in Durban, and onward to Johannesburg, back at the very pleasant Hyde Park Guest House. After getting settled in and unpacked, and relaxing with a nice glass of Pinotage, we decided it would be good to head out for a nice light supper. Looking at the various options walking distance from the guest house, including quite a cluster of restaurants on Oxford Road in Illovo (side note: our tendency to actually walk to places vs. taking an Uber seemed to shock our hosts a bit; while Johannesburg is not exactly a low-crime area, Hyde Park is rather secure, well-lit, and well-policed), we decided to check out Hogshead, a local beer and burger bar.

When we first arrived in Durban, we took the coastal Highway 2 up the Eastern Cape, past Richards Bay. As we passed through the minor town of KwaMsane around 4pm local time, we noticed a stretch of highway where several dozen groups had all set large cooking fires with metal pots, and were preparing meals, many of them preparing to sell them roadside. The food wasn’t ready yet, and we were actually in a bit of a hurry to get to the Zulu Nyala lodge, but I was curious. Several days later, talking to our Zulu Nyala guide, he told me that what they were preparing was a local dish, “Inyama yenhloko”, which means, literally, “head meat”. It’s a traditional Zulu dish, especially for special occasions and for the head of the family, although it’s gotten broader acceptance more recently. The process is simple: fresh bovine heads are collected, they skin the heads, cleave the meat off the skulls (usually with an axe), and boil the meat in large pot of salted water, along with some cornmeal bread. It’s then all chopped up, lightly seasoned with a seasoning mix, and served on a wooden board with salt, pepper, and chiles. I was intrigued, but our travel plans didn’t have us driving down any Zulu-region highways at dinner time. But our last full day in Durban had us taking a Cultural Walking Tour of Durban run by a local named Johnny, who showed us many of the various cultural aspects, and sometimes the grittiness, of Durban. It was a very insightful tour, and after seeing the Durban skyline, and visiting several of the area markets, he took us to a very special niche market right outside the Early Morning Market: the very aptly-named Bovine Head Market.

Our first full day in Durban was taken up doing some light sightseeing and getting a feel for the area, visiting The Kwazulu Natal Society of the Arts, the Phansi African Art Centre, and spending a nice early afternoon wandering about the expansive Durban Botanical Gardens, after a nice stroll along the Golden Mile beach (which was pleasant, but swimming was not recommended due to elevated bacteria levels from the recent major flooding), we decided to check out one of Durban’s more unique restaurants, Cargo Hold.

The next stop on our trip to South Africa was a few days spent in Durban to explore the beachfront and explore the area a bit before heading back to Johannesburg. Durban has an interesting history; it’s the third largest city in South Africa, and one of Africa’s largest ports. Now just part of the larger eThekwini municipality, it is a highly ethnically diverse city, with large Zulu, White, and Asian populations, and the metro area hosts one of the largest Indian populations outside of India. From that history, Durban has developed it’s own variety of Indian food, with one particular dish that’s become well-known: Bunny Chow. We first got turned on to bunny chow from UK chef Ottam Yottolenghi, when he did a Guardian article on the dish. It’s one of those unique fusion dishes, with a loaf of bread (usually white sandwich bread, and sold by the fraction of a load, so a “quarter Bunny” is a 1/4 of a standard loaf), hollowed out and filled with a curry of your choice. The local curries tend on the spicy-but-not-overly hot side, and it’s traditional to eat it by tearing off break and sopping up the bits of curry. There are many, many places to get Bunny Chow in the Durban area (heck, it’s pretty popular across South Africa, I saw it several times in Johannesburg, too), but they were concentrated in the suburbs. Downtown, there’s a number of well-known cafes that serve up Bunny Chow, but one of the better-reviewed ones was Billal Cuisine out by the beachfront.

A week at Zulu Nyala Heritage Safari Lodge passed surprisingly quickly, and we soon found ourselves packed up after one last morning game drive, ready for the drive back to Durban, where we were spending a few days. Since we had most of the day available, we decided to take a bit of time getting to Durban, checking out the nearby town of St Lucia. St Lucia sits at the mouth of Big Five False Bay, and is known for both iSimangaliso Wetland Park and the large bloats of hippos in the river that occasionally ramble through the town. We weren’t around during ideal hippo viewing times, but did have a pleasant visit to Jabula Beach and Mission Rocks in the Wetland Park, and decided it was prudent to have a late lunch before the final drive down to Durban. Looking around the downtown area of St Lucia, we settled on The Ocean Grill

As I mentioned in the previous review of Ngweni Railroad Brewery, we did several side excursions while staying at Zulu Nyala, and one of the more enjoyable day trips was to the nearby Hluhluwe Imfolozi Reserve. Hluhluwe-Imfolozi is the oldest proclaimed nature reserve in Africa, having been established in 1895 from the former hunting reserve of King Shaka as a preservation reserve for the Southern White Rhino, and it’s a very nice reserve; in addition to having populations of all of the Big Five game animals, it also has quite a bit of scenery as well, with several high ridgelines and hilltops overlooking the Imfolozi and Hluhluwe river valleys. After a splendid morning observing sunrise, lions, and rhinos, our driver took us up to the Hilltop Camp, where we had breakfast at the Mpunyane Restaurant overlooking the valley.

After a day and a half of recovering from our long non-stop flight from the US, we took a domestic flight to Durban (on local low-cost carrier Kulula, which I actually highly recommend), and embarked on a 3.5 hour drive up to the Zulu Nyala Heritage Safari Lodge outside of Hluhluwe. Our safari visit to Zulu Nyala was configured a bit like a cruise: our visit included two daily game drives (sunrise and evening) and buffet-style meals, plus the ability to do a number of value-added excursions. Most of these were designed to take you for animal experiences beyond those of the smaller Zulu Nyala reserve, like seeing lions in the larger Manyoni reserve, a day trip to Hluhluwe National Park, or a trip into St Lucia to see the hippos. But a few of the excursions were smaller affairs that could be done during the mid-day break between the game drives, which is how we found ourselves at Ngweni Railroad Brewery.

Sometimes in our search for truly offbeat locations, Offbeat Eats finds ourselves in some interesting scenarios, like drinking Namibian beer in the back of a bookshop in a suburban shopping mall in Hyde Park, a northern suburb of Johannesburg. How we got here was an interesting story; going with friends to a charity auction for the Upper Valley Humane Society, we ended up winning a bid on a week-long safari at Zulu Nyala in kwaZulu-Natal, scheduled for April 2020. Well, we all know how 2020 turned out. Over the next two years, that trip got delayed a half-dozen times, and then more than a little drama with South Africa (riots in 2021, severe flooding in April 2022), a hotel getting sold and having to rebook, and United Airlines canceling a week’s worth of flights due to jet fuel shortage. These almost led to our May 2022 trip getting canceled. But despite all that drama, we ended up having a smooth 16 hour flight, arriving in the evening in Johannesburg and getting a driver to take us to our Johannesburg-area accommodations at the splendid Hyde Park Guest House and promptly crashing into bed. The next day, after an insightful, but historically sobering, tour of Constitution Hill, we ended up going to a quirky dinner spot that had been recommended by a fellow guest at the Guest House: Olives & Plates.

As I discussed in my 2018 review of House of Wu, there was a nice mid-20th century tradition toward Tiki culture, combining Americanized Chinese food and other Asian cuisine and Tiki-style cocktails in an over-the-top Polynesian theme. The result is a mix of cultural integration, cultural preservation, adaptation, preservation… as well as more than a little improvisation and occasionally appropriation, but there’s an entire two generations of Americans that grew up with this sort of joint. But while there’s been a recent resurgence in both cocktail culture and Polynesian cuisine, the last few decades haven’t been kind to a lot of these older venerable restaurants, and many in New England (Chicopee’s Hu Ke Lau, Worcester’s Ken Chin, Woonsocket’s Ho Kong, Lynnfield’s Bali Hai) have shuttered in recent years, and a few of the others like Wind Tiki in Webster, MA falling to other fates like structural fires. So it’s important to enjoy some of the places that still remain, like Mon Kou in Attleboro, MA.