![]() Joe’s Butchery, the place to go for shisa nyama in Alex. No South African food tour would be complete without good old-fashioned shisa nyama, which means “burn meat” in Zulu. Shisa Nyama at Joe’s ButcheryĪs I said before, South Africans love meat. I stopped short of half but it was difficult. This was only the first of four feeding stops, Asanda said, and we would fill up fast. The sly vat vat cost R16.50, or just over a dollar.Īsanda, our guide, pleaded with us to eat only a few bites of the sly vat-vat. I could have added a fried egg if I’d wanted, and I slathered on some ketchup. Mine had all of the above, including fried polony (similar to baloney but fluorescent pink), and another kind of processed meat that I couldn’t identify. Put these two together and you get “sly vat-vat” - a monster of a sandwich that exists only in Alex.Ī sly vat-vat contains two or three slices of bread, filled with chips (french fries), tomato, meat, atchar (a South African pickle made from unripe mangos), cheese, and various other vat-vat. “What-what”, or “vat-vat”, are filler words to replace something that is too much trouble to describe. “Sly” is a slang term for a slice of bread. Our first stop was Mbopha’s Café, a takeaway joint on 3rd Avenue in Alex. Read about Cape Malay food here and here.)Īnyway, my perceptions of South African food widened last Friday when I participated in the Alex Culinary Tour by Tour2.0. We ate our way through Alexandra Township, starting with the humblest street food and working our way up to serious fine dining.Ī takeaway shop in Alexandra Township, otherwise known as Alex. (Cape Malay cuisine, mostly found in Cape Town, is an exception to this rule. ![]() ![]() My usual answer is, “…South Africans love meat.” I think even most South Africans would struggle to describe South African food, just as I do when people ask me about it. Colonialism and apartheid are to blame for this. Traditional South African food can be hard to find if you don’t know where to look. If you browse through the food-related posts on this blog, you’ll notice that most of them are written about food from places other than South Africa: French, American, Mexican, Indian, German, Chinese. ![]()
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