Why is Cape Town food so good? Climate, sea, history and money

A winter rainfall climate and what it grows

The farmland around Cape Town has what the industry body Wines of South Africa describes as a Mediterranean climate. Rain falls mainly between May and August, summers are warm and dry, and in the afternoons cool, moist breezes blow in from an Atlantic that the Benguela current keeps cold. Vineyards and orchards do well under that pattern, and the Western Cape has built an export economy on it.

The same seasons govern some of the region's oldest foods. Waterblommetjies, the flowers of Aponogeton distachyos, grow in ponds and vleis that often dry out in summer, and CapeNature puts the harvest at roughly June to mid-October, which is why waterblommetjie bredie is a winter stew of mutton or lamb, onions and potatoes. Rooibos is a plant of the same winter rainfall region, and since 2021 tea sold under that name in the European Union must have been cultivated or wild-harvested in designated municipalities of the Western and Northern Cape. According to the government news agency SAnews, it was the first African food to receive that protection.

A cold ocean and the people who fish it

The Benguela current runs north along the west coast of Africa from the Cape to Angola. The Benguela Current Convention, set up by Angola, Namibia and South Africa to manage the system, explains that winds push surface water offshore and that nutrient-rich water rises from the deep to replace it, so the sea is continually fertilised. The convention counts the Benguela among the four coastal upwelling systems found along the eastern edges of the world's ocean basins, describes it as particularly productive in terms of fisheries, and names sardine, anchovy, horse mackerel and commercial hake among its main species.

For Cape Town households, the fish with the deepest roots is snoek. In a 2013 study of the snoek trade in Ocean View, the researcher Moenieba Isaacs describes the suburb as a township the apartheid state established in 1968 under the Group Areas Act, when coloured residents were forcibly removed from Simon's Town, Noordhoek and Red Hill. Among the people she surveyed, 43% said snoek was their main and preferred source of protein, and one fish could feed a family of four for two days. It is mainly a winter fish, at its best from May to August, and families ate it fresh, salted and air-dried, smoked, fried or in stews.

Those habits survive in dishes that most Capetonians know. Smoorsnoek braises flaked snoek with onion and potato, a snoek braai glazes the butterflied fish with apricot jam over the coals, and harbour shops fry hake or snoek in batter for fish and chips. Pickled fish, fried and then left in a curried vinegar sauce, is eaten cold on Good Friday in Christian and Muslim homes. A conversation published by the Critical Food Studies programme suggests the custom may come from the Christian practice of not eating meat that day, from the sweet and sour style of Cape Malay cooking, or from the convenience of a dish that keeps over a long weekend.

The people who catch the fish have not always shared in the money it makes. Abalobi, a non-profit based in Muizenberg whose name means fishers in isiXhosa, runs an app and marketplace that lets small-scale fisher groups sell directly to shops, chefs and households.

Its executive director, Serge Raemaekers, told the paper that when the project began, even Cape Town restaurants marketed as places to eat South African seafood built their menus around fish that local fishers had not landed.

Enslaved cooks and the Cape Malay kitchen

The first ship to bring a large group of enslaved people to the Cape for the Dutch East India Company, the Amersfoort, arrived in March 1658; its crew had seized them from a Portuguese slaving vessel off West Africa. South African History Online estimates that about 63,000 enslaved people were brought to the Cape between 1652 and 1808, in roughly equal shares from mainland Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Madagascar and Indonesia. The writer Tony Karon traces the Cape's spiced cooking to the spices imported from the Dutch colonies in present-day Indonesia and Malaysia, and to the Javanese enslaved people who knew how to use them.

Many of these people cooked in settler households. The historian and chef Cass Abrahams told the Sunday Times that enslaved women "superimposed their way of cooking on what they were preparing", producing spicier dishes than the colonists had brought with them. The writer C Louis Leipoldt later called the methods of the Malay cooks the most potent influence on Cape cookery, although, as Ishay Govender pointed out in a 2020 essay for Daily Maverick, he praised their skill while rarely commenting on their enslavement. Govender also records that Abrahams, in her 1995 cookbook, described the cuisine as food from Africa and acknowledged the KhoeKhoe influences that earlier accounts had left out.

Even the name for this cooking is disputed. The researcher and poet Rustum Kozain told Govender that he learnt as a child that Cape Malay was an apartheid term and that being Muslim was the core of his identity. Govender herself calls the name a misnomer, one that has persisted partly because of the region once known as the Malay Archipelago. Among the dishes the term covers, bobotie, spiced mince baked under an egg custard, was in print at the Cape by 1870. Koesisters, fried yeast dough spiced with aniseed, cardamom, ginger and cinnamon, are usually eaten on Sunday mornings with tea or coffee, and breyani, the Cape's biryani, comes to the table with a tomato and onion sambal. The bobotie page in our food guide and our history of bobotie trace that dish through the printed record.

Wine since 1659

On 2 February 1659 Jan van Riebeeck, who ran the company's settlement at the Cape, wrote in his diary that wine had been pressed from Cape grapes for the first time, and he thanked God for it. In 1685 Simon van der Stel, then commander at the Cape (he became governor in 1691), established Constantia, whose sweet wine was sold across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Klein Constantia, which revived the wine in the late twentieth century, says it was enjoyed by Napoleon and praised by Jane Austen. The first large group of French Huguenots, Protestant refugees, arrived on 13 April 1688. South African History Online records that van der Stel gave them land at Franschhoek and Drakenstein, now Paarl, that 201 had settled at the Cape by 1692, and that many were experienced in growing grapes and making wine.

Wines of South Africa now counts 86,525 hectares of wine grape vineyards spread over some 800 kilometres, and says the country was the world's seventh largest wine producer by volume in 2025, with 4.5% of global output.

Migration and food from the Cape Flats

In the 2022 census, according to Statistics South Africa figures reported by City Press, 1,134,674 people who had moved away from the Eastern Cape named the Western Cape as their destination. One of the dishes most closely associated with that province is the Xhosa umngqusho, samp simmered with sugar beans until creamy, and samp and sugar beans are both in the Cape Town household food basket described in the next section.

Some of the city's best known food was invented on the Cape Flats. Rashaad Pandy of Super Fisheries in Athlone has claimed, in an account News24 repeated in 2012, that one night in 1976, having sold out of fish while feeding men he had hired for the day, he filled a round Portuguese loaf with chips, fried polony and achar. One of them called it a Gatsby smash, after The Great Gatsby, which had recently been shown at the Athlone bioscope.

Indian cooking left its own mark in the samoosas fried in Indian and Cape Malay homes alike, and in the roti and salomie sold at takeaways and bazaars.

Restaurants, visitors and money

National awards show how much of the country's fine dining is found here. At the Eat Out Woolworths Restaurant Awards in March 2026, FYN in the city centre was named Restaurant of the Year, and seven of the eight restaurants awarded three stars were in the Western Cape: FYN, La Colombe in Constantia, Pier at the V&A Waterfront, Salon in Woodstock and Salsify at the Roundhouse in Camps Bay, with La Petite Colombe in Franschhoek and MERTIA in Stellenbosch. The only three-star restaurant outside the province was The LivingRoom at Summerhill Guest Estate near Durban. On the 2025 extended list of the World's 50 Best Restaurants, the three South African entries, La Colombe at 55, FYN at 82 and Salsify at 88, were all in Cape Town. The 2026 list, whose places from 51 to 100 are published ahead of the ceremony in Lima on 4 November, had not appeared when this was written. We name these restaurants because the 2026 awards name them, and none of them paid to be mentioned.

The Western Cape government reported in April 2026, citing South African Tourism, that about 1.5 million international tourists spent almost R26 billion in the province in 2025, a quarter of South Africa's international tourism revenue. Restaurants, hotels and wine farms in and around the city compete for a share of that spending. Our guide to the city's restaurant scene looks at that side of the market in more detail.

The Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity group tracks a basket of 44 foods that women on low incomes in seven areas, among them Gugulethu, Philippi, Khayelitsha, Langa, Delft and Dunoon in Cape Town, say their households try to buy each month. It priced the Cape Town basket for a family of seven at R5,394.29 in August 2026. A general worker paid the national minimum wage of R30.23 an hour, working eight-hour days on all 20 working days in August, earned R4,836.80 before deductions. The basket includes samp, sugar beans, curry powder, apricot jam, tinned pilchards and 2kg of fish, the ingredients of many of the dishes described above.

The four forces at a glance

This table sums up the main points and figures from each section above.

Sources