I have eaten at somewhere between two and three hundred restaurants in Cape Town over the years, and I could not name more than about ten of them from memory. This is not a failing of the restaurants. Most were memorable. It is a failing of my note-taking, and a specific feature of a city where you can eat well enough that any given meal is unlikely to be the meal you remember above all others.

What follows is an essay about eating in Cape Town rather than a list of where to eat. Lists get out of date faster than the food gets served. Essays hold their shape longer.

The question that has no answer

Tourists arrive in Cape Town with a specific question: what is the best restaurant?

This is a well-meaning question and I understand the impulse. You have a limited number of meals during a limited trip, and you want to use them well. But it is also the wrong question, and the reason it is the wrong question tells you something about Cape Town.

The right question is: what am I in the mood for. Do you want an ambitious ten-course tasting menu that will take four hours and cost more than your accommodation? Cape Town has that. Do you want a burger and a beer at a place with concrete floors and an audience of people in their twenties? Cape Town has that. Do you want a linen-tablecloth long lunch on a working wine estate looking at mountains? Cape Town has that too, and it is genuinely one of the more memorable ways to spend a Saturday.

The city has all of these at a standard that competes with any equivalent city in the world. So the "best" question flattens the actual question, which is more like: which of these different excellent things do you want, right now?

The category Cape Town does best

If forced to defend a single category, I would defend cafes.

Cape Town's cafe scene is one of the more consistent things about the city. It is not necessarily the most ambitious category — cafe culture rarely produces Michelin stars. But it is where the city eats most days, and where visitors most often stumble into their favourite meals without meaning to.

Morning brunch in Cape Town is a proper institution. Every neighbourhood has its cafes. They are busy on weekends in the way that suggests the food is actually good, rather than the way that suggests they are Instagram destinations. The coffee is taken seriously — Cape Town has had a specialty coffee scene for over a decade now, with roasters like Origin and Truth producing beans that would hold their own in Melbourne or Portland.

You will not find these places on tourist top-ten lists. You will find them by walking into a cafe that looks busy at 10am on a Sunday and ordering whatever the person at the next table has. Rule of thumb: if a Cape Town cafe is packed at 10am on a Saturday, you should probably be in it.

The best meals I remember from my last few years in the city were not tasting menus. They were an eggs benedict at a corner cafe on a bright winter Saturday, a shakshuka on a sunny courtyard I could not tell you the name of, a laksa at a small pan-Asian place in a slightly rough-around-the-edges block. None of these will show up on a "best restaurants" list. All of them were the meal I actually wanted.

The tasting menu situation

I have been to two of the famous fine dining places in Cape Town. Both were expensive. Both were experiences I will not forget.

At one of them, they served a course that was scotched ice cream that tasted like a full English breakfast. Boiled egg, sausage, and toast, but as ice cream. Which sounds appalling and was somehow one of the best things I have ever eaten.

That is the thing about the fine dining scene here. When it works, it works at an international standard. The chefs have real technique, the sourcing is thoughtful, the ideas are genuinely creative rather than derivative. Cape Town's fine dining scene has a specific character that comes from being in a country with world-class raw ingredients and a tradition of home cooking that gives the chefs an inherited language to riff on. It is not French, it is not Californian, it is Cape.

But here is where I split from most travel writers. Fine dining is not the point of Cape Town. It is a genuine offering, and if you love tasting menus, go. But you can have an equally excellent time eating far more casually and spending a quarter of the money. If the fine dining doesn't especially appeal to you, do not feel you are missing something essential. You are missing something great. You are not missing "the point" of the city, because the city does not have a single point.

Where the good food actually lives

Two street clusters worth knowing about, both in the City Bowl area:

Kloof Street is the main food-and-going-out spine of the upper City Bowl. Restaurants line both sides for several blocks, running from casual to considered. Coffee shops open at 7am, dinner spots run until late. If you had to base a week of eating around a single street, this would be it. There is a Mexican place near Tamboerskloof at the top of Kloof that I have gone back to many times over the years for margaritas and something greasy. I could not tell you its exact name and I don't need to, because you will walk past it and know.

Bree Street, running parallel one block over from the CBD's main drag, has emerged as the more ambitious food street over the last decade. Slightly newer, slightly more curated, slightly younger crowd. Some of the most talked-about restaurants of any given year are on or near Bree.

Beyond these two, the city has clusters everywhere. Woodstock has been the "next big thing" neighbourhood for so long that it might just be the current big thing at this point. Sea Point has a strong food strip along Regent Road. The V&A Waterfront has restaurants that are perfectly good but overpay for their harbour views. Constantia has vineyard restaurants that do long slow lunches better than anywhere in the city. Camps Bay's beachfront strip is set up for exactly the kind of "meal with a sunset" moment it looks like.

Bo-Kaap has some of the best Cape Malay food in the country, which is the closest thing to a genuinely Cape Town-specific cuisine you can experience. Traditional Cape Malay curries, bredies (stews), and koeksisters (twisted dough dipped in syrup, an experience). It is one of the more distinctive meals you can have here.

What tourists overrate

[The V&A Waterfront](/cape-town/cape-town-where-to-stay-neighbourhood-guide). Not because the restaurants are bad — some are perfectly good. But because you are paying a real premium for the harbour view, and the food does not always justify it. I have had good meals there. I have not had memorable ones. If you want a nice view with your dinner, Camps Bay does views better.

The famous seafood places along the peninsula. Kalk Bay and Simon's Town have fish-and-chip institutions that have been around forever. I do not eat seafood so I cannot judge them personally, but the people I know who have tried them universally report the same thing: yes, it was good, but they have had better elsewhere. It is a Cape Town-visit ritual more than a food-experience-in-itself.

Anywhere that trades primarily on Instagram aesthetics. Cape Town has a category of restaurants that are very obviously designed for photography — pastel walls, brass fixtures, one plate on a marble table with a leaf next to it. The food is often fine, but you are paying to eat in a photograph. Locals have mostly stopped bothering.

Ordering the seafood or the meat "because you are in South Africa." South Africa has great seafood and great meat. It also has great everything else. The framing that you must eat certain things because of where you are misses the point of a city with genuine culinary range. Order what looks good.

What tourists under-rate

The neighbourhood restaurants without famous chefs. Cape Town has dozens of small, unfashionable, un-branded restaurants that reliably deliver excellent food to locals for years. Small pizza places. Family-run pasta spots. That one Vietnamese restaurant on a random street. These places are almost never on "top ten" lists because they don't chase press. But when a local tells you where they actually eat when they are not putting on a show, this is where they take you.

The wine estate restaurants. For lunch, in the middle of a warm day, sitting under trees looking at mountains, with a glass of something from the estate you are on — this is one of the more genuinely memorable ways to eat in this country. Constantia (Groot Constantia, Buitenverwachting, Beau Constantia) offers this without the drive to Franschhoek or Stellenbosch. But the full Winelands version is worth a day of your trip if you can.

Sunday markets. The Oranjezicht City Farm Market at Granger Bay on Sunday mornings, the Old Biscuit Mill on Saturdays. These are working food markets where locals actually shop, and where the food stalls range from croissants to Ethiopian curries to Vietnamese banh mi. Wander, graze, drink coffee, buy a loaf of bread. Some of the best meals I have had recently have been assembled in twenty minutes at these markets.

The service situation

Service in Cape Town is generally good, in the range of "warm, unhurried, competent." The tipping culture makes waiters attentive without becoming performative.

But it is not perfectly consistent. I have had bad service moments here that I still tell as stories. Once, at a busy but not particularly famous place, I had to carry my empty plates to the kitchen myself because nobody had cleared the table in forty minutes and the meal was clearly over. Once, at a different place, I sat for an hour and forty-five minutes and no food arrived, and I eventually just left. These stories are not typical, but they happen at second-tier places when they are busy.

The established places tend to have service down properly. The newer, smaller, or under-resourced places can occasionally forget you exist. This is not something to plan around — it is just occasionally amusing to encounter.

The one rule

If you take one thing away from this piece, take this: try a different place every day.

Do not go back to the same restaurant twice on a short trip, even if you loved it. There is too much good food, in too many varieties, in too many neighbourhoods, to spend one of your limited meals on repetition.

Ask locals — real ones, not the concierge with a list of restaurants that pay him — where they actually eat. Walk past busy cafes that are full of people who look like they live nearby. Read a couple of recent local reviews rather than curated global lists that were last updated in 2019. Follow your nose down a side street once. Order what the table next to you is having.

Cape Town rewards curiosity more than it rewards checklists. That is possibly the truest thing about eating here.

The short summary

The food scene is one of the best in the world for a city of its size. Fine dining is excellent if you want it. Casual is excellent if you want that instead. The cafes are secretly the strongest category. The V&A is overpriced. Kloof and Bree Streets are where to base yourself. Ask locals. Try new places rather than repeating good ones. Do not order according to what you think you should eat because of where you are.

And if a place serves you an ice cream that tastes like a full English breakfast, do not run. Trust it. It will be one of the more surprising meals of your life.

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