Over the past couple of years, we have watched Johannesburg deteriorate. We have seen parts of the city fall apart. For many of us, the fear of moving through it has become part of how we experience the place.
Yet when I ask people about Johannesburg, I want to hear stories about a time when they moved through the city without fear of the darkness it now carries.
I remember being told about the marvel that was the Carlton Centre, about the quality department stores such as Stuttafords and about a Johannesburg of Brenda Fassie and her entourage, of the parties they attended and the people they met along the way. It was a city where people worked hard and played hard.
Now, for many, it is a place to pass through — a taxi connection from one destination to another.
But there is another Johannesburg emerging alongside the one we have become accustomed to lamenting. It is being shaped by young people who are reclaiming the city, lighting up its alleyways and finding new ways to inhabit its streets.
There are jazz lounges filled with young people, restaurants and coffee shops with tables spilling onto pavements, reminiscent of the street life we might associate with cities such as Paris. There are clothing stores carrying proudly South African brands, creative spaces and independent businesses that are slowly reclaiming the city and asking what Johannesburg can become.
In this shifting landscape friends and attorneys Leah Houston and Nali Shayi founded Salt X Ceremony — a series of curated dinners on Johannesburg rooftops that brings strangers together around a table.
They describe is a love letter to the city. The idea began, somewhat unexpectedly, at a birthday dinner.
"Nels and I started Salt X Ceremony, funny enough, on her 30th birthday. That's where the idea came from. We were on a rooftop in Marshalltown at an artist studio and were supposed to have dinner in the studio. And then I was like: 'No, man, let's go to the rooftop to have dinner there because there was such a stunning view,'" Houston says.
After that evening, the two knew they wanted to do it again.
They wanted to do it in a way that resembles their grandmothers and how they gathered. So the name also comes from that sentiment.
"'Salt' being the base and staple of all meals and 'Ceremony' to honour the sacred nature of family dinners, how they can be the most mundane things or a part of rituals, habits and practice. We hoped to create the same feeling we have and had in our grandmother's homes with the love we have for the city.
"A lot of people have this big fear of Johannesburg, which is there because of the robberies and everything that goes on. But at that moment, we brought people who would not typically come to Johannesburg CBD and they felt so safe," she says.
A birthday party was the seed from which Houston and Shayi grew.
For Houston, the relationship with the city extends beyond its obvious difficulties. It is also about the small discoveries that complicate the idea of Johannesburg as somewhere to simply pass through.
Salt X Ceremony became a way of asking other people to stop and look.
Shayi says they kept the concept simple, drawing from something familiar to many South Africans: dressing up, gathering around a table and breaking bread together.
"The essence of Salt X Ceremony comes from the love of being South African and the love of our culture," Shayi explains.
"Our grandmothers, for both of us, play such an influential role in the way that they gather people. Dinner at my grandmother's was always one of the highlights of going down to the Eastern Cape. So the things that inspire us about gathering are from our grandmothers and are from our South African culture," she continues.
Their understanding of gathering does not begin with the underplates, colour palettes or carefully considered tablescapes. It begins with an understanding of identity, inheritance and the cultural nuances that shape how South Africans come together.
"My form of gathering and Leah's form of gathering is different just because of our backgrounds. I'm Xhosa and Leah is from Durban, she's coloured and her grandmother has a Mauritian background as well. But we found that the connective tissue between these matriarchs in our lives is that they value gathering in this way," Shayi says.
Food, too, becomes part of the storytelling. When Houston and Shayi speak about the importance of collaboration in telling the story of the city, it reminds me of traditional family ceremonies, when the aunts begin putting the menu together. There is care in that process but also remembrance.
Different hands contribute to making the story complete.
For Salt X Ceremony, chefs, distillers and other creatives are invited into the process, allowing each dinner to become an intersection of different forms of South African creativity. At their most recent dinner, the third instalment of their Sunday Best series, the founders, chefs and distillers once again came together around this idea of collaboration.
"We have a local chef and he's experimenting with a Mediterranean feel with the South African vibe. We have salmon on the braai and we have oysters on the menu. We also have a local distillery, that is based in Victoria Yards, that will be there," Houston says.
But the most important ingredient is the people around the table.
Social media might be the mechanism through which many people first encounter concepts such as Salt X Ceremony but the dinner asks people to put their phones down and engage with strangers.
"I became interested in the dynamics of that exchange: What happens when people who do not know one another are asked to break bread together at night, in a city that is bursting at the seams with problems?
"The thing is, there is such a level of transparency in people, people are interested in meeting other people and people are interested in connecting. They just need a space that's safe enough to do that," Shayi says.
"Our Salt X Ceremony guests are curious and they want to experience something different. Curiosity is always surprising to me. But Leah and I live the same way. We're very curious. We're always trying to do new things or speak about new things. And so curiosity always surprises me," she says.
Perhaps this is where Salt X Ceremony becomes more than dinner. It is an attempt to create a different relationship with a city that has become difficult to navigate. It does not deny Johannesburg's problems, nor does it pretend that a beautiful rooftop dinner can solve them. It creates a temporary space in which people can experience another version of the city — one defined by conversation, food, creativity and the possibility of connection.
The future of Salt X Ceremony is not mapped out through a conventional business-growth plan. There is no rigid blueprint for how many dinners they should host, how large the events should become or how far the concept should expand. Instead, they keep returning to the original question: What did they want to create and how can they get there?
For Shayi, creative expression remains the starting point rather than growth. Growth, she says, has happened almost as a consequence.
"We're still figuring out growth," she admits.
The uncertainty feels appropriate for a project built around discovery.
Salt X Ceremony is young. It is learning what kind of space it wants to occupy and what kind of growth would honour its beginnings.
The founders acknowledge that some opportunities might stretch the project in exciting ways, while others could take it too far from the original intention. For now, the table remains the anchor.