Cape Town's restaurant scene in 2026: awards, prices and pressures

How big the trade is

Statistics South Africa measures the industry through a monthly survey of 800 VAT-registered restaurants, coffee shops, takeaway outlets and caterers. It put the industry's income at R113.8 billion in 2025 at current prices, 8.2% more than in 2024. Restaurants and coffee shops earn close to half of that money, takeaway and fast-food outlets about two fifths, and caterers the rest. The release does not break the figures down by province or city, so Cape Town's share cannot be read from it.

The latest release, covering June 2026 and published on 27 August, shows the trade struggling once inflation is taken out. Measured at constant 2019 prices, income in the second quarter of 2026 was 0.7% lower than a year earlier, and restaurants and coffee shops, down 1.9%, were the main reason for the fall. Inside restaurant takings, food and bar sales moved in opposite directions: at current prices their food sales in June were 13.4% higher than a year before, while their bar sales were 9.6% lower. Prices are rising faster than in the wider economy, too. Stats SA's consumer price index for August 2026 shows restaurant prices up 5.7% in a year, against headline inflation of 4.4%.

Visitor numbers reached a record in 2025: Cape Town International Airport handled 11.1 million two-way passengers, according to Wesgro, the provincial tourism and investment agency, and 3.3 million of them were international passengers, 7% more than in 2024. December alone brought almost 364,000 international passengers through the airport. Wesgro's chief executive, Wrenelle Stander, has said the province intends to double tourism by 2035.

The awards: Eat Out, World's 50 Best and Michelin

The Eat Out Woolworths Restaurant Awards, the country's main restaurant ranking, were presented on 23 March 2026. FYN, on the fifth floor of the Speakers Corner building on Parliament Street, was named Restaurant of the Year, and 66 restaurants received stars. Three stars go to restaurants that score more than 90 out of 100, two stars to scores between 80 and 89, and one star to scores between 70 and 79.

Two more are in the Winelands, La Petite Colombe in Franschhoek and MERTIA in Stellenbosch. The eighth, The LivingRoom at Summerhill Guest Estate in Pinetown, KwaZulu-Natal, is the only one outside the Western Cape.

The other prizes

The award winners at a glance

This list shows every restaurant this article names with Eat Out stars, an Eat Out award or a World's 50 Best placing, three-star restaurants first. "Not stated" means this article does not give that detail, not that the restaurant has no award.

World's 50 Best

On the global list compiled by The World's 50 Best Restaurants, La Colombe entered at number 49 in 2024, the only African restaurant in the top 50 that year. In the 2025 list it slipped to 55, with FYN at 82 and Salsify at the Roundhouse a new entry at 88, which left South Africa without a restaurant in the top 50. The 2026 list is due to be announced in Lima on 4 November 2026, with places 51 to 100 released beforehand, so the 2025 placings are the latest available at the time of writing.

Where the restaurants are

The starred restaurants are grouped in a handful of districts, and our Cape Town restaurant map plots ten well-known places, among them FYN, La Colombe, Salsify and The Pot Luck Club. The City Bowl holds more of them than any other district.

The awards say little about where most Capetonians eat. Much of the city's everyday eating happens at takeaways far from these districts, the kind of places that sell the gatsby, a long roll filled with chips and cut into shares, whose best-known origin story, told in our food guide, is set in Athlone.

Our Cape Town food guide covers the dishes behind these places, from Cape Malay cooking to braai and street food.

What a meal costs

We checked the published menus of three restaurants in September 2026 to show the spread at the top of the market. La Colombe charges R2,495 a person for its Chef's Menu and R1,695 for a weekday spring lunch menu, which it says is valid until 30 November 2026, and adds a discretionary service charge of 13.5%. Belly of the Beast lists its dinner tasting menu at R1,200 a person and its lunch at R850. The Pot Luck Club's winter sharing menu costs R695 a person at lunch until 31 October, and its Sunday brunch of ten courses, with bottomless sparkling wine, costs R1,390.

For a sense of the range between a tasting menu and a neighbourhood café, our guide to Cape Town restaurants with a view covers places at several price points, and our feature on why Cape Town's food is so good explains where the city's ingredients and cooking traditions come from.

The drought and the power cuts

Restaurants need water and electricity for every service, and in the past decade there has been a crisis in the supply of both. During the drought, the City of Cape Town limited residents to 50 litres a person a day from February 2018 and required commercial users to cut their consumption by 45%, easing the limits only from 1 October 2018. A study by Kaitano Dube, David Chikodzi and Godwell Nhamo found that average spending by international tourists in the province fell by 30% between 2017 and 2018. Researchers at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology who interviewed 29 fine-dining owners and managers recorded how they adapted: they switched off ice machines, used disposable serviettes, steamed food in place of boiling it, and paid for boreholes, tanks and grey-water systems. The same study found that media coverage of Day Zero kept visitors away.

Load shedding, Eskom's scheduled rolling blackouts, lasted longer. In 2021 Wendy Alberts, chief executive of the Restaurant Association of South Africa, estimated that running a generator could cost a restaurant about R1,000 an hour, or around R6,000 on a day with six hours of cuts. The worst year was 2023, when Eskom imposed load shedding on 335 days, for a total of 6,778 hours.

Wages, tips and who keeps them

The national minimum wage rose to R30.23 an hour on 1 March 2026, and it applies to waiters as it does to other workers. The National Minimum Wage Act excludes gratuities, including tips, from the calculation of a worker's wage, so a restaurant cannot count tips towards the minimum. In a written reply to a parliamentary question in 2025, the Minister of Employment and Labour repeated that employers cannot use tips to meet the minimum wage, acknowledged complaints that tips paid by card do not always reach staff, and said the department was exploring policy options.

Speaking on CapeTalk in December 2025, Wendy Alberts of the Restaurant Association of South Africa said that restaurants have no right to keep any part of a tip:

Tips belong to the waiter. They don't belong to the restaurant.Wendy Alberts, Restaurant Association of South Africa

She added that waiting staff in many restaurants agree among themselves to share part of their tips with kitchen staff. Service charges are a separate matter: a percentage added to the bill, such as La Colombe's 13.5%, is described as discretionary. Jobs in the trade have been at risk before: in July 2020, restaurant staff and owners protested in several cities against the Covid-19 curfew and alcohol ban, and the restaurateur Liam Tomlin warned that 300 jobs at his businesses were at risk.

Restaurants named in this article

Each restaurant below was confirmed as operating by a source dated 2026, and the list was checked in September 2026.

• FYN, Parliament Street, City Bowl: Eat Out Restaurant of the Year 2026 and number 82 on the 2025 World's 50 Best list.
• La Colombe, Silvermist estate, Constantia Nek: three Eat Out stars in 2026, and the only African restaurant in the World's 50 Best top 50 in 2024.
• Salsify at the Roundhouse, Camps Bay: three Eat Out stars, and the 2026 Chefs' Chef award for Ryan Cole.
• Pier, V&A Waterfront, and Salon, Woodstock: the two other Cape Town restaurants with three Eat Out stars in 2026.
• Amura, Mount Nelson, Gardens: opened in December 2025 and named Eat Out's Best New Restaurant in March 2026.
• Belly of the Beast, Harrington Street: a 30-seat, two-star room serving one tasting menu, at R1,200 for dinner.
• The Pot Luck Club, Woodstock: two Eat Out stars in 2026, with a winter sharing menu at R695 a person at lunch until 31 October.
• Mzoli Meat, Grill & Gardens, Dunkley Square, Gardens: the Gugulethu shisanyama's new home, which opened in September 2026.

Sources