#Food

A couple of weeks ago I received an invitation to visit Azteca Mexican Food Products, a Mexican food factory in Joburg. Azteca’s owner, Gaby Agraz, reached out to me because I had just published a post about Mexican restaurants in Johannesburg. Most of the restaurants I wrote about are Azteca’s clients, Gaby told me, and she would love to show me the business. (This wasn’t the first time Gaby had extended an invitation. She first reached out to me more than a year ago but somehow I kept forgetting to follow up. I didn’t know what I was missing.)

This week I got a behind-the-scenes look at No. One Eloff, an exciting new development project in downtown Joburg.

No. One Eloff is a huge, 1950s-era building that used to be an automotive storage/sales facility (for Rolls Royce and then for Chrysler) and later became an OK Bazaar and then an auction house for repossessed cars. A couple of years ago, a company called Molten Black purchased the building, with the plan of turning it into a residential/retail property. That plan is now in full swing.

I’d known about the Black Forest Bakery for years. I’d bought their rye bread from the Melville Spar, where it is sometimes (but not always) for sale in the bakery section. (I’m not a huge fan of rye bread, to be honest, but I still buy the Black Forest rye from time to time because it’s so much better than that bland, packaged Sasko bread favored by mega-grocery chains like Spar.)

Seriously. I spent so much time running around trying to see things in Istanbul that I actually didn’t have time to eat all the Turkish food I wanted to try. This is almost unthinkable for a food-loving person like me. But there you have it.