FOOD & DRINK
Guide tips
Jonas Barausse
KwaZulu-Natal The CRAFT BEER
revolution hit Durban a few years back, and S43 was the first distillery to pop up. It’s both a restaurant and a bar with an amazing selection of beer.
station43.co.za
Danie Van Zyl
Northern Cape In the Kalahari, we’re great meat eaters;
Feasting at
4Roomed Ekasi Culture restaurant Bottom left: Abigail Mbalo
we say that our side dishes are chicken, our salads are sheep. All our meat is cooked on a BRAAI (barbecue). We enjoy big steaks, often with roosterkoek, a traditional bread grilled over the fire.
me. “Come on, let’s go back to 4Roomed. I’m excited to cook for you.” Abigail’s fine-dining restaurant, named after the standard township four-room home she grew up in, is a beautiful arrangement of upcycled antiques, eclec- tic furniture, ferns and fairy lights. I settle into my chair and prepare to feast. Abigail and her team ply me with botanical virgin cocktails and plate after plate of gorgeous food. To my palate, everything is exotic and new. There’s isonka samanzi steamed bread; umngqusho, which is coconut cream-soaked samp (corn meal); mouth- watering mleqwa chicken slow-cooked with fennel; and plenty of curries, meats and salads. But, Abigail says, for anyone who grew up in an township, dining at 4Roomed should be a trip down memory lane. “With our cuisine, we want to tell
stories about growing up in neighbour- hoods like this,” she explains. Pudding is dished up with a personal
story. It’s clearly an embarrassing one as Abigail starts giggling so much that one of her chefs has to come out of the kitchen to finish the story. “We’ve made our take on amakhekhe, a township scone with choco- late and citrus. And these,” he says, present- ing a tray of caramelised sugar swirls in the shape of a ‘4’, “are to remind us of the sugar Abigail burnt on MasterChef that got her eliminated!” Still chuckling, Abigail joins me for dessert. “That’s one of the things about us South Africans. Be it a township upbringing or a television appearance, we’ll always have hope, because we extract the good from our past.”n Amelia Duggan
4roomedekasiculture.com SOUTHAFRICA .NET 25
Charles Ncube Gauteng
Traditional African beer is called
UMQOMBOTHI, and in Johannesburg you’ll find it brewed right here in Soweto. We mix sorghum with water, and there’s
natural fermentation. We drink it after a long day, or at
traditional events
when communicating with our ancestors.
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