The best restaurant neighbourhoods

Restaurants, like people, tend to run in packs. There are several neighbourhoods in Joburg known for their collection of restaurants of varying quality.

Some, described below, are obvious: Melville and Parkhurst have been restaurant meccas for decades, and Greenside has lately attracted the stars among the city’s restaurateurs. Parktown North has fulfilled its earlier promise and offers several good places to eat.

A new entry is Melrose Arch, where a selection of restaurants, some of them highly regarded, is set out close to one another in this cobblestoned quarter.

The addition of Kensington may come as a surprise; it is in development, with only one or two top establishments, but may well be on its way. As for Norwood, although the chains seem to have pushed out most of the gourmet spots, one or two remain. And Fordsburg is one of those neighbourhoods where you can’t go wrong.

Melville is the oldest restaurant haven in Joburg. For several blocks along Seventh Street, from First to Fifth avenues, you’ll find a range of eateries, including some of the most successful in the city – like Soi, largely Thai but with a few Vietnamese dishes, and Nuno’s, which is part of a burgeoning empire. Nuno de Gouveia owns the popular Portuguese Restaurant and All-Day Café, which specialises in fish, seafood, pasta and pizza; the Xai-Xai Lounge next door; and the Portuguese Fish Market and Deli just across the road. Building another Melville empire is former journalist Samson Malugeta, who first bought the Melville Grill and has now opened Abyssinica, an Ethiopian restaurant, across the way.

Soulsa, towards Fifth Avenue, boasts that it was judged to have the best food in Melville at the Visa/Starfish Foundation long table. The menu changes often but a recent one featured lots of beef fillet and rump steak (served with jalapenos stuffed with mozzarella, apricot, coriander and chilli chutney as well as springbok and ostrich). Café MezzaLuna has excellent Italian cuisine and the tiny Chilli (taste Afro-nirvana, says its menu) serves bunny chows, breyani and curries.

At the far end of Melville, at Rustenburg Road and Ninth Street, is the Service Station, one of the more surprising success stories for a rough, tough town like Johannesburg. It offers salads and quiches which patrons heap on to their plates and then pay for by weight. It opens early for breakfast but closes in late afternoon – and despite queues of people on Fridays, particularly, and huge crowds on Sunday mornings, the restaurant has neither added tables – widely spaced for privacy – nor begun taking reservations.

The traffic circle at the confluence of Greenway and Gleneagles roads in Greenside has been attracting top chefs since chef/patron Tim Allcock opened Café Flo, one of the best restaurants you’ll find anywhere. Allcock has a record of launching and running successful establishments. This one has all the best dishes from his former ones – thin-crust pizzas with toppings like roast lamb and aubergine, Thai prawn soup, duck confit, fabulous pasta – and a few new ones, for example, peppered fillet with pommes frites (or steak-and-chips), rack of lamb with herb crust, good prawn and calamari dishes.

By Barbara Ludman

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Courtesy of joburg.org.za