Nick Hamman

A hollowed-out loaf of white bread, filled with curry and eaten with your hands. The exact origin story is still debated, but the most consistent history points to Durban’s Indian community around the 1940s, linking the word “bunny” to the Bania or Baniya, merchant class. What is not up for debate is that this was food born out of ingenuity, exclusion, community, and deep flavour. A portable meal that turned limited resources into something iconic. And that is why searching for a great bunny chow outside of Durban is dangerous work. People are protective for good reason. So yes, Joburg has a lot to prove here. But these five spots seriously did. Nick Hamman is a South African broadcaster, storyteller, and food-culture creator. He is the host of 5FM’s national breakfast show, 5 Breakfast, and the creator of Hammy Eats, a platform dedicated to discovering the people, places, and stories behind South African food. Follow Time Out Johannesburg on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram! While you're at it, sign up for our newsletter to receive even more of the best of your city.

There are plenty of places to get a warm drink in Johannesburg. These aren't those places. This list isn't about latte art or cafés that look like they were designed for first dates that will never go anywhere. This list is about places with stories. Places where a cup of coffee, tea or chai comes with culture, history, community and, more often than not, actual value for money. Johannesburg might be one of the best cities in the world for warm drinks. Within an hour you can drink Ethiopian coffee, Taiwanese milk tea, Chinese jasmine tea, Turkish coffee, masala coffee and a township cappuccino without ever leaving the 011. Not every great warm drink in Johannesburg comes from a trendy café with exposed brick walls and a R70 flat white. Some come from Chinese tea rooms hidden in Cyrildene, Ethiopian restaurants in Milpark, Turkish cafés in Fordsburg and ambitious young entrepreneurs building something special in Alexandra. So before you order another forgettable flat white, consider this your invitation to explore. Nick Hamman is a South African broadcaster, storyteller, and food-culture creator. He is the host of 5FM’s national breakfast show, 5 Breakfast, and the creator of Hammy Eats, a platform dedicated to discovering the people, places, and stories behind South African food. Follow Time Out Johannesburg on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram! While you're at it, sign up for our newsletter to receive even more of the best of your city.

Johannesburg is South Africa’s real global African city. Gold pulled people here in 1886. Since then, people have arrived for work, safety, school fees, second chances, family, faith, love, and survival. After the nineties, Joburg opened itself again, this time to more of our neighbours from the African continent. I think one of the best ways to understand Johannesburg is to eat with the people who came here to build new lives, carrying the knowledge of what they ate back home. Food travels when people do. Recipes survive borders. Restaurants become a communal space where people can connect around a shared understanding of a plate. So, for Africa Month, I wanted to share the places in Joburg where you can taste the continent without leaving the city. Go respectfully. Ask questions. Pay properly. Eat with your hands when that is how the food is meant to be eaten. And remember that someone’s everyday lunch may be the thing that teaches you more about Joburg than you ever thought possible. Below are 11 of my favourite places to experience African food in Johannesburg. Nick Hamman is a South African broadcaster, storyteller, and food-culture creator. He is the host of 5FM’s national breakfast show, 5 Breakfast, and the creator of Hammy Eats, a platform dedicated to discovering the people, places, and stories behind South African food. Follow Time Out Johannesburg on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram! While you're at it, sign up for our newsletter to receive even more of the best o

The bottles arrive empty. By the time they leave the production line in Johannesburg South, they are bright red, blush pink, green and gold; filled, capped and labelled for weddings, dinner tables and nights out where, for once, the person not drinking alcohol gets something that does not feel like a consolation prize. I’m standing beside Nabeelah Bahadur, a 26-year-old accountant by training who now describes herself as a manufacturer, entrepreneur and “overall hustler”. She co-founded La Cabonada with members of her family after spotting a gap that seems obvious once somebody points it out: why are people who do not drink so often given the least interesting drink in the room? Behind us, the process begins with properly treating the water. The bottles are cleaned, sterilised and moved along the line. Flavours are measured, machinery hisses, and every part of the process has to happen consistently. There is something reassuringly accountant-like about the way Nabeelah approaches it all. She understands that a dream only becomes a real business when the numbers, process and product work together. But what she is building is also surprisingly emotional. It is about allowing people to participate without having to explain themselves. La Cabonada’s core range consists of seven ready-to-drink, non-alcoholic, halaal, and vegan carbonated mocktails, packaged in 275ml glass bottles. The flavours travel: Midnight Cherry takes inspiration from Turkey; Ispahan combines lychee and rose

When I first wrote about And Fries, the future looked brutally uncertain. A driver had crashed into its Mofolo South store and fled, leaving a young township business with serious damage and a repair bill that would have seen many giving up. This isn’t a giant franchise with a legal department, a national maintenance team and enough money to absorb a few difficult months. It is a proudly Sowetan business built carefully, creatively and brick by brick by Lwazi Madonsela and his team. I asked South Africa to help. And South Africa did. The story we shared travelled far beyond the people who already knew And Fries. Thousands of people shared it, liked it, commented, tagged companies and, most importantly, donated real money. We have all seen stories go viral. We watch, feel something, leave a heart emoji and move on to the next thing. This time, people opened their banking apps. They sent what they could. They showed a young entrepreneur that the country had not forgotten him. The support gave Lwazi and his team more than money. It gave them momentum and the will to carry on. Rather than waiting for the entire store to be repaired, they got the food truck going and created a pop-up outside the damaged premises. The first one sold out. Friends arrived to DJ. The staff got back to work between the rubble, repairs and construction materials. Burgers were being assembled metres away from the physical evidence of everything that had happened. I went back for the next pop-up because I

Pork belly, mustard mash, the freshest vegetables, a fennel jus I’d happily order again tomorrow. The kind of lunch that, had it been served to me in an expensive restaurant with crisp linen and someone topping up my water every few minutes, I would have been none the wiser. But this meal wasn’t made in a restaurant. It was prepared for me by the Year 4 learners at EduStreams in Midrand, a nonprofit school for students who learn differently. And as good as the food was, and it really was that good, the story behind it is what stayed with me most. EduStreams was founded by Wendy Roux in 2022, born out of the very personal need to find the right educational environment for her own child. As a new dad, I feel stories like this differently now. You understand, in a much deeper way, what a parent will do when their child needs something the world is not giving them. SuppliedWendy Roux, founder of EduStreams Their motto is “No Child Left Behind”, and walking through the school with Head of School Alan Nambiar, a lifelong educator with a background in psychology, you can feel that this is not just a line on a wall. It is the whole point of the place. In the gardens, learners are gaining agricultural skills, with much of what they grow finding its way into the kitchen. In the woodworking area, they make pieces that can be sold to raise money for the school. In the arts centre, you see young people light up because they have been given a way to show what they can do. And then there

I went to Mofolo for a burger and left convinced I had just eaten at the kind of place South Africa should be fighting to protect. And Fries is a proud township food business in Soweto, built by local creative and entrepreneur Lwazi Madonsela. On paper, it sells fried chicken burgers, wings and loaded fries. In reality, its so much more, this spot is led by a young South African taking a category people think they know and giving it care, flavour, identity, culture and proper pride. The burger I had was excellent. The brioche bun had that soft, buttery richness you want from a proper burger bun, but still held everything together. The fried chicken was crunchy, juicy and deeply seasoned, with the kind of bite that makes you pause mid-conversation, but doesn’t stop you eating. The creamy slaw brought freshness, the pickles cut through the richness, and the sauce pulled the whole thing together in that messy, indulgent, deeply satisfying way that only a great burger can. If you go for the Aioli Burger, expect a brioche bun stacked with deep-fried chicken, cheese, creamy coleslaw, house pickles and signature aioli. If you want something with more heat and sweetness, the Spicy Ranch Burger leans into hot-honey fried chicken, cheese, lettuce, pickles and ranch sauce. And the fries are not there to make up space in the box. The loaded fries come piled with crispy chicken bits and creamy sauces. This is the kind of food that makes you full, happy and ready to plan your next visit Bu

Few places show Johannesburg to you as clearly as Alexandra. Stand in Alex and look across the highway. Sandton is right there. Glass buildings. Cranes. Office towers. Restaurants. Generators humming through load shedding. The confident architecture of money. Then look around you. Crowding. Broken infrastructure. Flooding. People doing the daily, exhausting work of making life happen in a place that has been asked to be “resilient” for far too long. That contrast should make you angry. But if you only look at Alex through what it lacks, you miss the people building inside it anyway. Lebone Applegreen is one of them. Nick HammamLebone Applegreen, founder of Lumos Coffee Creations She is 22 years old, born and raised in Alexandra, and the founder of Lumos Coffee Creations, a township café brand with a dream big enough to make most people nervous. Lebone wants to build the biggest township café brand in South Africa. After meeting her, I would not bet against it. Lumos did not begin with a perfect shopfront, a big investor, or one of those start-up decks full of words like scale, disruption and ecosystem. It began inside her grandfather’s home, where Lebone was raised by her single mother. It began with what she had, where she was. It also began with a gap she saw.  Nick HammamLebone wants to build the biggest township café brand in South Africa.   Lebone wanted to create somewhere young people could gather without alcohol being the centre of everything. Somewhere warm and

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. Nick HammanSouthSide Grills in Protea Glen, Soweto When I arrived, the weather was m