SouthSide Grills: What Hloni built with his mother’s last R10 000

Youth Month in South Africa can become a performance very quickly. The speeches are polished, the posters go up, and the same people who failed young people all year suddenly start speaking about their future.

I do not have much patience for that.

What I do have time for are the young people building anyway. The ones with no perfect conditions, no big safety net, no waiting room full of investors, just a skill, a plan and enough stubbornness to keep opening the doors.

That is what took me to SouthSide Grills in Protea Glen, Soweto, to meet 24-year-old, Hloni Motaung.

Protea Glen is one of those places that tells you a lot about Johannesburg if you are willing to look properly. There are new houses, backyard businesses, food spots, families trying to move forward and the usual township frustrations sitting right next to the progress: power issues, service delivery problems, bad roads, rising costs.

It is not easy ground to build on. But that’s not stopping Hloni.

His story starts with his mother, Constance. After she was retrenched, she gave him her last R10 000 so he could start something of his own. Soon after that, she passed away.

That R10 000 meant everything to Hloni. It carried trust. It was his mother saying, “I believe you can do something with this,” at a time when she had every reason to hold onto it herself.

You can really feel that sense of responsibility in the way Hloni works.

When I arrived, the weather was miserable and the outside tables were wet. Before we even spoke properly, he made sure there was a dry place for me to sit. Small thing, maybe, but I noticed it. People who care about the small things usually care about the food too.

And the food here isn’t messing around.

SouthSide Grills serves the kind of kotas and burgers that will insist you skip your next meal. They are big, saucy, messy, generous and built for people who can eat. The Bazooka, which is a hallowed out full load of bread is loaded with chips, meat, sauce, egg, cheese and enough confidence to make you reconsider your afternoon plans. There is a tower burger, stacked high, juicy and completely uninterested in pretending to be health food.

But the food only explains part of the place.

The rest is Hloni watching the floor, checking orders, looking after customers and carrying his mother’s belief in him into the daily work. He is not romantic about the grind. He knows what rent, stock, weather and electricity can do to a small business, but he shows up every day and pushes on.

This is why I care about the place.

South Africa is full of talented young people. Too many of them are expected to prove the impossible before anyone takes them seriously. Hloni is doing the work now, in public, with real pressure and real customers.

Go to SouthSide Grills hungry. Order properly. Leave knowing you have supported a young man turning loss into something people can gather around.

Address: 7737 Lehele Street, Protea Glen, Soweto.