#Restaurants

Second in my Roadhouses of Gauteng series.  Browse all of my roadhouse posts or view a map of the roadhouses I’ve visited.

In my first roadhouse post, I mentioned I’d been meaning to do a roadhouse series for years but never got around to it. One of the reasons it took so long is because documenting roadhouses – at least in the way I want to document them – is not easy to do alone. I needed to find a roadhouse partner.

First in my Roadhouses of Gauteng series. Browse all of my roadhouse posts or view a map of the roadhouses I’ve visited.

I’ve been planning to blog about South African roadhouses – the equivalent of American fast-food drive-ins – since 2015, when I ate lunch at the Casbah Roadhouse in Brakpan during a Joburg Photowalkers outing.

I’ve hardly blogged about restaurants this year. I don’t eat out much these days, and when I do I usually go to places that feel safe and familiar. But a couple of weeks ago I went for lunch at Anong Thai in Cyrildene with my friends Yoko and Ang. I had never been to Anong before, and as soon as we pulled in I was pretty sure it was going to be a blog-worthy experience.

Today, the South African restaurant industry participated in a nationwide demonstration called “One Million Seats in the Streets”, to protest the government’s treatment of the hospitality sector during the COVID-19 lockdown. The hashtag for the movement is #JobsSaveLives.

I was talking on the phone with a friend this morning. I can’t remember her exact words, but she said something to the effect of, “I thought things would feel better once we moved to Level 3. But instead they feel worse.”

It’s Day 62 of the South African lockdown. But I barely care about that right now because I’m just excited to write about cool things I saw and did today in Melville – like I used to do on this blog before there was a pandemic.