Food
South Africa Food Guide
A cuisine built from Cape Malay cooking, Indian indenture, Portuguese trade routes and the fire everybody in the country gathers around.
- Country South Africa
- Category Food
- Reviewed 16 August 2026
- Sources 3
- Length 2 min read
Credit LABUSA Travel, January 2026
South African food is a record of who arrived and who was brought here, and it is one of the more legible histories on the table anywhere. Almost nothing on this page originated in one place.
The braai
A braai is a barbecue in the sense that a cathedral is a building. It is the default social occasion, it is a verb, and it has a public holiday informally attached to it. Meat over wood coals, not gas, and the fire is tended by somebody who has opinions about it.
What appears on it: boerewors, the coiled farmer’s sausage, sold by the meter and eaten in a roll; lamb chops; sosaties, skewers that carry the Cape Malay influence in their apricot and curry marinade. Alongside it, pap, a maize porridge stiff enough to eat with your hands, with a tomato and onion relish.
Cape Malay cooking
The cooking of the Bo-Kaap descends from people enslaved and exiled to the Cape from Southeast Asia, and it is the most distinctive regional cuisine in the country. It is aromatic rather than fiery: cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and turmeric doing the work that chili does elsewhere.
Bobotie is the dish that represents it, spiced minced meat under a savory custard, usually with a bay leaf standing in the top. Denningvleis, a sour lamb stew, and koeksisters, a plaited doughnut soaked in syrup, are the others to look for. The sweet and savory combination that runs through all of it is the signature.
Durban, and the curry
Durban has the largest population of Indian descent of any city outside India, the legacy of indentured labor brought to the sugar plantations of Natal, and it has a curry tradition that is its own rather than an import.
The bunny chow is the thing to eat: a hollowed out half loaf of white bread filled with curry. It was originally food that could be carried and eaten by people barred from restaurants, which is worth knowing while you eat one. It is hotter than most visitors expect and it is not eaten with cutlery.
Worth going out of your way for
- Bobotie, the Cape Malay minced meat bake under a savory custard
- Bunny chow in Durban, a half loaf filled with curry
- Boerewors from a roadside stand, in a roll, with relish
- Biltong and droewors, air dried and spiced, and better than the jerky comparison suggests
- Chakalaka and pap, the relish and porridge that accompany almost everything
- Malva pudding, a sticky apricot sponge served hot with cream
- Rooibos, grown only in one small region of the Western Cape and drunk everywhere
Drinking
South African wine is among the oldest of the New World traditions and the winelands within reach of Cape Town are a proper destination in their own right. Chenin blanc is the grape the country does better than anyone, and pinotage is the one it invented and that people argue about.
Rooibos, the red bush tea, grows only in the Cederberg and nowhere else on earth. Amarula, from the marula fruit that elephants are famously fond of, is the after dinner answer.