It doesn’t look as if we’ll make it up to Mozambique this time round, but we did go for lunch at Mo-Zam-Bik in Florida Road with my mother and BFF Julie Simpson. One of a chain of pleasant-but-not-great “family restaurants”, it’s down the same alleyway where the great Gaby’s Portuguese restaurant used to be.
From my mother’s prawns Bilene (R86; US$6), served in a creamy cheddar and feta sauce, to our prawn rissoles (R59) and starter portions of peri-peri calamari (R65) mopped up with those delicious Portuguese bread rolls, the food wasn’t bad. That’s a fiery-hot peri-peri sauce in the Coca-Cola bottle below, by the way.
Nice service, too, and I can vouch for the Sofala craft beer on draught. (Best avoid Mozambique’s dreadful rum and raspberry, or R&R, made from a rotgut mix of local rum and synthetically sickly sweet, red carbonated fizz.)
Memories of Florida Road
I was with BFF Julie at Florida Road’s now-long-defunct Keg & Thistle, when we first met Roy, his cousin Richard and their friend Jonathan on 25 August 1992. That’s also where Roy proposed to me, exactly three years later. (He and I still celebrate that date as our “Keg-iversary” – always in a pub, of course.)
According to a brochure put out about five years ago by the municipality (find it at durban.co.za/Discover_Durban), Florida Road is “one of Morningside’s leafiest and most picturesque roads” and something of a culinary high street for Durban diners, with new venues opening all the time. That’s been true as far back as I can remember, and it’s still the case.
From 1973 to 2006, culinary doyenne Christina Martin, who founded the KwaZulu-Natal branch of gastronomic society the Chaine de Rotisseurs, ran a cookery school in Florida Road, and a restaurant where you could enjoy an outstanding yet affordable lunch cooked and served by her students. (Sadly, Christina died suddenly in 2006, but the Christina Martin School of Food & Wine continues its work in the Durban suburb of Westville.)
Finally, it looks as if top pick-up joint Billy the BUM’s has packed it in after what must be decades; and I can’t think why, as it was perennially heaving with hopefuls. (Anyone else remember those alarmingly bright blue cocktails-to-share served in a fishbowl with six straws?) Butcher Boys steakhouse is still going strong, and Butcher’s Block has opened opposite The Benjamin Hotel – South African like meat! Next door to Butcher Boys is the new and highly rated Fish on Florida, run, we’re told, by the same two women who made such a success of Café Fish (now defunct) down at the yacht mole on Victoria Embankment.
Street art in Morningside
Mural art seems to be a growing thing in the city of my birth, and Florida Road is no exception. Look at the one above, near the corner of Gordon Road. A few metres from it is another interesting example of street art, apparently started a couple of years ago: a remembrance fence on which you’re encouraged to attach a lock so as to keep alive the spirit of Madiba, (the affectionate nickname for Nelson Mandela). Here it is below.
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Tyre trouble in Morningside
On a less uplifting note, we got back to our rental VW Jetta after lunch to find that one of the tyres had split during our absence – whether by malicious attack or as the result of a flaw in the tyre, it was impossible to say. The tool provided to loosen the tyre’s safety nut (a necessary evil in a country where tyre theft is common) wouldn’t work, and Woodford, our car hire company, took four hours to eventually resolve the problem by giving us another car.
Roy bore the brunt of all this misery, it must be said, while I sat comfortably drinking coffee and chewing the fat in my mother’s flat. Without my laptop and in the presence of the only audience (admittedly captive) in the world that will listen to me rabbit on unconditionally – my mother – I reckon that, for once, I got through my entire daily allocation of words.
It’s not so bad when car trouble strikes in the suburbs, but I hate to think of the consequences of something like that happening on a long trip – to Cape Town, say, through the Transkei – because car hire companies just don’t seem equipped to provide support. Hertz in the UK was just as bad when our keys were stolen.
