The nostalgia of restaurants far and wide — and a modest proposal

The author is not a board-certified gastronome, although he worked in a restaurant for four years and was trained as a cook in the army. But beyond that, anyone who has read any of our previous articles about food and the circumstances of consuming it around the world will have recognised a real appreciation and adventurousness when it comes to all the offerings of the world’s food cultures. 

One thing I have a particular love for is the well-established neighbourhood restaurant that doesn’t consciously try to be trendy or too avant-garde, a place that serves real food honestly prepared, and where repeat experiences never disappoint. Sadly, too many such places eventually close because of the death of the chef or owner, or because the proprietors miss out on some new restaurant trend, or because of changes in a neighbourhood where they once were fixtures.

Washington, DC

For decades, in the Washington, DC area, for example, one of our favourites was Crisfield’s, a popular seafood restaurant. It was tucked into a side street, virtually underneath a railroad bridge in Silver Spring, Maryland. The first time I wanted to take her there for dinner, my wife almost refused to go because of its location in a rather down-at-the-heel, slightly shady, light industry neighbourhood.

It was a family-operated place that was open for almost 80 years; a younger generation would take over from the earlier one, with the same menu that offered clams and oysters on the half shell, as well as other dishes like their renowned soft-shell crab sandwiches, and their baked flounder stuffed with real crab meat, a dish that never used that aberration of red-dyed, faux crab sticks.

They would never share their precise recipe for my favourite flounder dish, despite the fact that it seemed simplicity itself — fresh-caught fish, fresh crab meat, a dab of butter or oil, and some spices, plus an oven. 

When it closed last year, the line of customers at the door determined to eat there one last time stretched clear around the block, every night for more than a week. This imminent shuttering became big news in America’s capital city.

When I learned about its imminent shutdown, I suddenly regretted living thousands of kilometres away and was unable to devour its cuisine and atmosphere one more time. The place was authenticity personified. 

There are so many other dining experiences where just thinking about them provokes instant nostalgia for me and probably many others. Undoubtedly, these would include a favoured — because of convenience, taste, and cost — pizza, curry, chilli, Chinese food, or a hamburger place close to where one went to university and where it became your group’s default gathering spot. 

For others, instant nostalgia triggers could include old-style delicatessen eateries like the ones in the television series Seinfeld or the film When Harry Met Sally. Or perhaps it was one of those hole-in-the-wall Italian sandwich shops that made submarine/hoagie/grinder sandwiches on those long rolls, stuffed with Italian-style cold meats and cheeses, sliced tomato, shredded onion and lettuce, and seasoned with diced chillies, olive oil, pepper and oregano. 

Or perhaps it might be one of those places offering “Philadelphia-style” steak and cheese sandwiches festooned with grilled sweet peppers and onions. Then, too, there are the remaining diners across the US with their distinctive exteriors that echo a passenger train’s dining car and whose menus always offered old-fashioned favourites or specials that were a reach back to the owner’s ethnic background. They used to be everywhere, but they are slowly giving way to urban redevelopment projects.

Indonesia

Back in the 1970s, half a world away from Silver Spring and Crisfields, in the then only partially containerised port of Tanjung Priok that served Indonesia’s capital of Jakarta, where an unreconstructed part of the harbour still had gangs of stevedores unloading and loading smaller freighters with their bulk cargoes, there sat the legendary Jun Njan restaurant.

It was one street back from one of the piers, in a ramshackle building with big, permanently open windows that had rattan shades to deal with the midday sun. The place served up a mixed Chinese-Indonesian style seafood menu. 

One always went with a crowd as platters of steamed shrimp, cumi-cumi (cuttlefish), ginger-flavoured steamed kakap fish (red snapper), or fried noodles and mixed seafood would arrive, inevitably with Bir Bintang, the Indonesian offshoot of Heineken. (The “don’t drink the water” rule prevailed.) Every table had its inevitable bottle of red Tabasco sauce (the McIlhenny company’s product has true global reach) plus a small bowl of super-hot chillies soaking in soy sauce. 

Meanwhile, pedlars selling strange souvenirs, clove-scented kretek cigarettes, and thin cigars rolled from Sumatran tobacco would importune diners to purchase their offerings. Underneath the Formica-topped tables, a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” would be playing out. Stray cats vied for any scraps that might have fallen from the tables — and not unimportantly, also kept any still smaller creatures firmly in their place in the ground-level pecking order. 

This, too, was a place that practically dripped authenticity and it would have been the perfect inspiration for a George Orwell, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham or Joseph Conrad story taking place in “The East”. And maybe it had.

But alas, the world stands still for no one. Years later, an Indonesian co-worker went back to Jakarta from Washington for a visit. On my behalf, he went looking for the Jun Njan, both to have a meal there and to bring me a souvenir copy of their menu for old times’ sake.

He found the restaurant eventually, but, sadly, it had moved from its old harbour location and was now ensconced inside a hotel in the city’s business district, the kind of building that is sheathed in glass, aluminium and chromed steel and could be anywhere in the world. No cats, no pedlars, no astonishing parade of street life outside the restaurant’s windows. That was not progress.

Japan

Some years later, when we lived in northern Japan, we became frequent customers of an izakaya, an informal, casual-style restaurant, located in the covered arcade of Tanuki Koji (or Badger Alley) in Sapporo. It was a big, open-plan restaurant where the tatami mat seating surrounded the kitchen located in the middle. It served all manner of local specialities, largely drawn from the bountiful sea surrounding Hokkaido island as well as the agricultural produce of that part of the country. 

One of the unique specialities of the house was frozen deer meat sashimi. It arrived at one’s low table set on top of those typical Japanese tatami mats — there were no chairs in the restaurant — on a super-chilled plate with the meat sliced razor-thin and served with a variety of dipping sauces. Other dishes might be grilled table-side or prepared by chefs behind the bar or kitchen. 

From the afternoon onward, the place was filled with students and office workers seeking an informal meal and a beer or two with friends and colleagues after work. For us, it was the perfect place to take foreign visitors since it bore no hint of having been set up for tourists. In fact, well beyond the deer meat sashimi, the menu was so expansive there were choices for even the pickiest (or most trepidatious) eater, even vegans. The Japanese can turn almost anything edible into something tasty. Sadly, this place, too, has vanished — or perhaps it just metamorphosed into something grander and posher. But it would never be like our old haunt.

Joburg

Meanwhile, closer to home in Johannesburg, I recall with a sense of loss places to eat that have vanished into history. They weren’t quite as ancient as the Guildhall, the Radium Beer Hall, or the Rand Club, but they had staked out firm places in the city’s fabric for decades.

Many long-time residents of Johannesburg will have had their favourites, and naturally there will be partisans for other places, but four of mine were Gramadoela’s, Linger Longer, Kapitan’s and Trattorio Fiorentio. (Of course, other people will have their favourites, such as the now-shuttered Carlton Hotel’s Three Ships or Koffiehuis restaurants or even the chain of Mike’s Kitchen eating spots.)

The first of my list, Gramadoela’s, had been housed in several downtown locations before it found its permanent home at the Market Theatre back in the 1990s. It offered a wide variety of traditional South African dishes — up to and including mopane worms. Once in its Market Theatre space, it became a perfect theatre district-style restaurant that could deliver meals to its clientele so that they never missed the start of a show. At the entry door, it boasted a guest book that featured signatures from the powerful and famous from around the world, rivalling most dining spots near New York’s Broadway or London’s West End. 

After a performance, one could table hop from one group of theatre goers to another, right up until closing time. Gramadoela’s had taken over the spot once occupied by Harridans, a nouvelle cuisine meets heartier South African recipes kind of place. Its clientele had included artists, actors, business leaders and tourists. It even drew an occasional national government figure checking out the alien contours of Johannesburg.

Sadly, with the death of the co-owners, Gramadoela’s passed into history, but not before its eclectic furnishings were auctioned off. When that happened, we successfully bid on some of its signature serving platters for old times’ sake so we could remember the food, the ambience, the clientele, and its sui generis pair of owners, Brian Shalkoff and Eduan Naude. 

Read more: What’s happening on the Jozi food scene – and what we didn’t see happening

Two of my quartet of restaurants were in Braamfontein, close to the University of the Witwatersrand. Trattorio Fiorentio offered exceptionally good Italian food in rooms designed to look like an old taverna or even a wine cellar, while Linger Longer inclined more towards a version of contemporary haute cuisine — but one that acknowledged a South African love of meatier fare.

In both places, you could find a range of diners ranging from political activists to captains of industry coming over from nearby CBD headquarters offices. Back in the 1980s, on several occasions, I hosted then-banned persons for leisurely lunches at Linger Longer, giving my guests, separately, of course, because of those banning orders, appetising breaks from daily routines of police harassment.

But now both are gone, although the proprietor of the old Trattoria Fiorentio has opened a new favourite, Mastrantonio’s, located deeper into the city’s northern suburbs than the old location. A foreign diplomat who joined me for lunch there recently remarked it was one of those weird things about Johannesburg: One could find really good restaurants in a small shopping mall, just off a busy main road and next to a jumble of clothing and home furnishings stores.

The most unusual of this quartet would certainly have been Kapitan’s. The owner, Madan Ranchod, told me he had once been a chef on a super yacht belonging to a Middle Eastern potentate, but, settling down, he had opened his restaurant on Kort Street just behind the Star newspaper offices.

His restaurant had extraordinary decor choices — plastic grape vines hanging from the ceiling, airline posters of Latin American tourist destinations, and those inevitable Formica tables. His savoury, but spicy crab and prawn curries probably owed more to Thai than Indian culinary tradition, reflecting his travels, but even late in his life, the owner did all the cooking. 

This restaurant had been a favourite of Nelson Mandela from the time before he had been imprisoned. Behind the chair and table Mandela had usually preferred, there was a yellowed newspaper clipping about his appreciation for this restaurant, pinned to the wall behind the same chair Madiba used to sit in — Chicago-style — so he could see who was entering the restaurant. I used to take visitors from the US there to give them a physical connection to some of South Africa’s history — and to enjoy a great meal. 

A modest proposal

These memories, collectively, have been encouraging my thinking about just how one could create a dining spot in Johannesburg that could fill niches not now being offered in and around the city. What kind of place could literally ooze local authenticity in the cuisine on offer and yet appeal to a wide range of eager customers? 

What kind of place would attract today’s younger nouveau riche who yearn to connect with local traditions, but which would simultaneously draw foreign visitors and business travellers keen to discover a venue well beyond the bland internationalism offered by most of the city’s upscale dining spots?

And so I have begun thinking about what kind of place that could be, and I started to think about creating a truly upscale shisanyama.

Read more: A cuisine forged in fire in a city spawned by gold

Chef Khloe Mokhema describes the shisanyama as a place “which literally means burnt meat in Zulu, [and] is the term used in townships to describe where people make and serve the braais. People from all walks of life flock to shisanyamas, whether they’re the CEO of a successful company or a general worker, and if there’s one place that doesn’t grade you on who you are in the outside world, it’s a shisanyama. They’re fantastic tourist attractions as you can experience the liveliness and authenticity in the heart of a township, and if you aren’t welcomed by plumes of smoke from the braai, you’re surely at the wrong place.”

More and more, these days, people of all backgrounds live and work in the formerly white neighbourhoods of Johannesburg, and they want to entertain their business clients, family, and friends in stylish, upscale establishments where there is good food and a convivial atmosphere.

So what about the idea of creating a shisanyama that reaches out to these potential customers, especially if it offers the real deal in the food it serves? This could be a warm, comfortable yet stylish venue where the kitchen is a centrepiece for diners’ entertainment — almost like theatre. There could also be a comfortable area where customers could cluster around other flaming grills to talk and debate the fates of their favourite sports teams and politicians — naturally with a cold beer in hand. But beyond that, this shisanyama would also have elegant sit-down dining, decorated in that smooth, minimalist Japandi blend of Japanese and Scandinavian design aesthetics.

In our imagination, we have already started calling this place Sof’town, in memory of the unique textures of the old Sophiatown, a name and location woven deeply into South African literature and music. I can already visualise our grand opening night, with the music group,