Restaurateurs and chefs are turning their livelihoods around and then around again, with each new set of regulations, performing almost impossible pirouettes, some gracefully, some with a sorry stumble.
Ziggy the Seventh Street cat troddles bulkily in his full-fur coat, across the road. I don’t hold my breath today because there’s not much traffic even though it’s Saturday. Anyway, Ziggy does it twice a day each way and knows his treat beat. He belongs to an arty woman with a pet food parlour named after him, and her actor husband. But Ziggy’s the independent type, intent on his route with fewer rewards.
Melville is a good place to gauge many things and restauranting is one of them. Guide books say it’s “an accessible microcosm of Johannesburg”. I know what they mean. A full variety of colours, creeds, ages and sexes, South Africans and internationals, sit out on the pavements. They’re a pretty friendly lot so it’s where conversations and gauging can be done.
Of those 37 places, 12 remain open in some sit-down measure. One of them is Hell’s Kitchen, though its sister restaurant La Santa Muerte is shut. Hell’s Kitchen sports a lot of outdoor space, all unoccupied. Jonno Kirby the owner isn’t in and I don’t see the kitchen fire lit, where rather good burgers and steaks are shown the boozy flames. A waitress tells me “more” people will eat here “tonight”. More than none.
A very large IT “café” has been licensed until now, to sell both wine by the bottle and food takeaways during lockdown Level 3. Tables and chairs had been set out in the courtyard parking lot, where people were presumably free to combine their drinks and food at one sitting if they chose. And they did.
There aren’t many easy-to-spot foreign NGO types on the street any more. Two people speaking masked German pass me quickly but that’s all. I ask a local guesthouse owner where the visitors go out to eat now. He says, “They don’t – they order in through Uber Eats. Everyone’s scared.” He says he hasn’t eaten out since lockdown but might, he concedes, go to a place he trusts, “very well-run, like Pronto in Craighall”. I know it is open for sit-downs.
Here and in the rest of Joburg, I am fascinated by how owners and chefs are turning their livelihoods around and then around again, with each new set of regulations, performing almost impossible pirouettes, some gracefully, some with a sorry stumble. And my expectations about patrons’ behaviour is not all going as I’d presupposed.
“The best of it all is that the guys that have been with me through all these years and businesses can be with me still. We can continue to work!”
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