A SMALL shopping centre in suburban Pretoria seems an unlikely spot for a restaurant specialising in African South African cuisine.
You’d expect an antique shop in such a centre, perhaps, a caf, a post office, a select bookshop. But Ntombi Msimang chose the site for Safika carefully. She opened two months ago in Maroelana, a tiny suburb between Brooklyn and Menlyn – and a few minutes away from Hatfield, where the foreign embassies are. She’s an accountant, and she first totted up the number of foreigners in Pretoria, assuming foreign residents and tourists would dominate her clientele.
Embassy people are beginning to come in, but mostly it’s been her Afrikaans neighbours and local business people, black and white, who have been pitching up, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights. Parties of 12 drive in from Hammanskraal, she says; while local businessmen bring their wives and children, saying “I used to eat this on the farm when I was growing up. It really takes me back.”
Safika was the brainchild of Msimang, who followed her husband, then executive director of Satour, from Durban to Pretoria two years ago and noticed a certain dearth of venues offering down-home cooking. She and her niece found three other women to buy into the idea – a lawyer, a PRO and a lecturer at the Technikon in Durban – plus the Small Business Development Corporation, which also helped.
Msimang recruited the chef, Nkosinathi Tshabalala, who had been working at Gold Reef City and tourist lodges, quit her accounting job, and the two spent a month cooking – “to get him back into the African way”, she says – trying out her recipes, his recipes, contributions from families and friends.
Now he cooks and she tastes. “In another year,” she says, “I’ll be twice this size.”
It’s buffet only, and Msimang talks new customers through it. There’s always a soup and vetkoek. There are always three or four starters, some meat and chicken dishes, lots of vegetables, curries, sambals.
Photographer Ruth Motau says the malamogodi – black tripe, actually – is perfect, and so is the umngqusho, stamp mielies-and-beans – exactly the way her mother makes it. The morogo isn’t smothered in peanuts; there’s only the vaguest hint that a peanut has passed that way. The futari – pumpkin and sweet potato in peanut sauce – is wonderful. Not surprisingly, malamogodi, morogo and futari disappear off the buffet the fastest.
There are plenty of vegetables, some of them curried – not exactly hot enough to blow the top of your head off, but quite nice all the same. And there’s a marvellous okra bredie. Msimang is one of the few people on earth who knows how to turn okra into the sort of dish one dreams about: at the same time spicy and delicate with not a hint of viscosity.
Otherwise, vegetables are usually pretty dull; if they weren’t, there would be more vegetarians. In any case, vegetarians, used to chefs sneaking marrow bones into benign- looking soups, should be safe at Safika: Msimang’s middle daughter has been a vegetarian most of her life. They understand us here.
They don’t go in for desserts much at Safika, just fruit salad and a fruit basket, and maybe on weekends a bit of custard and a pie. It is, says Msimang, the African way. I can only take her word for it. On the other hand, grownups are greeted with a complimentary glass of umqombothi, or sorghum beer, and children with a drop or two of maheu.
Safika is open for lunch Tuesday to Friday and on Sunday, and for dinner from Tuesday to Saturday Tel: 012-46-9269