The Joburg I Haven't Seen Yet

Last week, I came across a headline that made me question whether I have been eating my way around the wrong Johannesburg. Time Out had ranked Johannesburg as the eighth-best city in the world for street food, putting it ahead of cities like Bangkok, Singapore and New York. Eighth in the world. I have lived here for 7 months, and I have not eaten street food here once. Not because I don't want to, but because I haven't even seen it.

This shouldn't really have come as a surprise. I knew before we moved to Johannesburg that I would experience the city from a particular vantage point. We live in Illovo, spend a lot of time in the surrounding suburbs, and, like most people, have gradually built ourselves a small network of places that feel familiar. I know where I like to get coffee, where we go for dinner, which bars I like. I've never pretended that this is the whole of Johannesburg. But sometimes it takes a list like Time Out's to remind you just how much of the city sits outside the version you have constructed for yourself.

But the ranking still made me question - if Johannesburg really is one of the best street-food cities in the world, why have I not experienced any of it?

The obvious answer is that Johannesburg is an enormous, complicated and deeply divided city. Where you live matters. Where you feel comfortable matters. The places you are accustomed to going become the places you keep going. And before long, without quite meaning to, you can end up with a very polished little map of a city that is actually far bigger, stranger and more interesting than the one you know.

As any avid reader of this blog will know, I have made a pretty concerted effort to explore Johannesburg since moving here. I've written about its galleries and theatres, and its nightlife, explored neighbourhoods I knew nothing about, gone looking for green spaces and generally tried not to fall into the trap of thinking that Johannesburg begins and ends with the suburb where I chosen to live.

The problem is that, looking back, I've mostly explored the parts of Johannesburg that I already know how to explore. I know how to go to a gallery. I know how to go to a theatre. I know how to find a good restaurant or a bar. These are all things I would have done in London, or in any other big city I lived in. In that sense, I've been exploring Johannesburg, but I've been exploring it through the things that are familiar to me. Evidently, the street food scene here is different.

Part of what struck me about the Time Out ranking is that, in cities like Bangkok or Singapore, street food is almost impossible to separate from the experience of the city itself. You don't necessarily have to seek it out. It spills onto pavements and into markets; you walk past it on your way somewhere else. It is simply part of the fabric of the city.

Johannesburg feels different. And I suspect that has something to do with the way the city was built, and the history that still shapes where people live, work and move around today. Apartheid didn't just divide people politically and socially; it created a geography of separation that Johannesburg still carries. The city is sprawling and fragmented, and the things that make up everyday life in one part of it can feel remarkably distant from another.

That might help explain why I can live in Johannesburg for months, read that it has one of the best street-food scenes in the world, and realise that I've not encountered it at all. Because some of the places where I imagine finding that street food are places I have mentally filed away as somewhere I shouldn't go. Not because there is necessarily a sign saying 'no-go zone', but because Johannesburg has a reputation for crime that makes you conscious of where you are, when you're there and how you move through the city. Add in the fact that I'm still relatively new here, don't always know the geography and am not particularly keen on driving, and the invisible boundaries of my world become very easy to maintain.

So perhaps the question isn't why I haven't discovered Johannesburg's street food. It's what else I've failed to discover because I've been navigating the city according to the boundaries of my own comfort.

So I think I'm going to try something slightly different for the rest of my time in Johannesburg. Less searching for the next great restaurant or the next interesting neighbourhood I can comfortably fold into the version of the city I already know, and more deliberately looking for the places and experiences that sit outside it.

That might mean eating street food in places where I would usually lock my car door as we drove speedily past. It might mean taking a tour with someone who knows a part of the city I don't. It might mean getting on public transport, wandering somewhere without a carefully researched itinerary, or simply saying yes to things that don't fit neatly into "my" Joburg.

I'm not pretending that I can, or should, experience every part of this city. The city's history and its present-day realities mean that some boundaries are there for good reason. And as a newcomer, there will always be parts of the city I don't understand in the way someone who has lived here all their life does. I don't necessarily want to escape my bubble. I just need to make it a little bigger.

Because if Time Out is right, there is apparently a whole world of Johannesburg street food out there that I haven't even begun to taste. And after months of thinking I've been getting to know this city, I'm suddenly quite excited by how much of it I still haven't seen.

Notes from 26° South.