#Food

It’s that time of year again: October in Joburg. Jacaranda trees all over Joburg (and Pretoria, too – more on that in a future post) are exploding with purple blossoms and everything wrong with the world feels right again (mostly). To make matters better, Joburg’s hospitality industry actively promotes jacaranda season and there are some really cool promotions on, like the jacaranda-themed “Bubbles & Sweets” menu at the Four Seasons Hotel in Westcliff.

I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for weeks but I kept getting distracted by other adventures: a dazzling community light festival, a 2-billion-year-old meteorite crater, and a Heritage Month tour of churches. Now I’m back on track and ready to tell you about my food explorations in Rivonia.

I’m struggling to figure out how to start writing this post because I’m struggling to figure out how to explain koesisters.

The koesister ranks among South Africa’s most iconic foods, right up there with biltong, boerewors, chakalaka, and milk tart. Koesisters are vaguely like donuts, just with a different shape, flavor, and texture. (So maybe not that much like donuts after all.) The koesister’s identity is further complicated by its close relationship to the koeksister – same word except with an extra k in the middle, but possibly stemming from an entirely different root – to which the koesister is similar, but different.

I’ve always been intrigued by Kensington, a suburb just east of downtown Joburg. Kensington is similar in many ways to Melville, where I used to live, and Brixton, where I live now: An older neighborhood, filled with big trees and houses with pressed-steel ceilings, populated by lots of quirky artists and other creative types. Kensington is only about 20 minutes’ drive away but I feel like I haven’t spent enough time there over the years to really get to know it.

A couple of miles southeast of downtown Joburg, in a place called City Deep, there’s a produce market the size of a small town. The Joburg Market (next door to the Mutliflora Market) is the largest fresh produce market in Africa – or the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, depending on who you talk to – and it’s where most of Joburg’s restaurants, produce shops, and vendors buy their fruit and veg.