The Yeoville Dinner Club is one of the most delicious ways to experience Joburg multiculturalism

Sanza always has a stew on the table and the idea is for diners to wipe their plates clean with the mandazi in the same way people from the Horn of Africa use a spongy flatbread called injera to eat.

Sanza Sandile is turning the continent’s staple food into haute cuisine at the Yeoville Dinner Club. His third go at running a restaurant, his menu reflects his life in Yeoville and travels around Africa. Lerato Mogoatlhe joins the feast. Our bodies are in Joburg, but our taste buds are on a trip around Africa, biting into Morocco, wiping sauce from a Congolese dish with a starch from East Africa, and a beloved coleslaw made with seeds and coriander.

The long table with 18 people around it has plates filled with fish, rice, cow heels, coleslaw, morogo, salads, atchaar and other dishes Sanza Sandile is about to serve. He stands at the top of the table to start his presentation, taking us through the connection between how his childhood in Soweto and travels around Africa evolved into the Yeoville Dinner Club, where he curates private meals and has an open table that meets whenever enough people (18) book.

I eat here often. Other people miss their mom’s comfort cooking, but I yearn for Sanza’s soul food. Tonight, I’m here with a friend. There’s a couple on their weekly ritual of going on a date to experience something new – from salsa to African cuisine. There’s a group of hip-looking dudes from YFM, where Sanza was a deejay from the early to mid-2000s.

Now, instead of spinning tunes, Sanza cooks whatever he wants, and it’s always with creativity and a sense of adventure. Sanza ate his way around the continent; each new taste and texture being transformed into memories that he didn’t want to fade. Sanza remembers destinations by their ingredients and food culture. His favourite childhood memories all include food from his mom’s kitchen, where creativity made up for limited choice.

Everything is a story with Sanza. He serves magwinya (vetkoek or fat cakes) because they take him back to East Africa where they are called mandazi. He always has a stew on the table and the idea is for diners to wipe their plates clean with the mandazi in the same way people from the Horn of Africa use a spongy flatbread called injera to eat. Sanza knows that people often don’t like brinjal, so he roasts it North African-style and uses it as a base for his atchaar, giving personality to what’s frequently deemed a boring vegetable. The black paste made with onions, dried shrimp and habanero peppers is shito, from Ghana. Shiro, an Ethiopian ground-chickpea dish, is enhanced with a popular West African sauce that’s made from okra. In many of the places Sanza has been to, people are rigid about how traditional food is prepared and served.

West Africans use gallons of palm oil. This oil, so loved in Congolese cooking, can be overpowering and leaves orange stains on lips and fingers. It gives stews a rich, red sauce. Sanza picks the best of techniques and ingredients and turns them into dinner parties. For instance, the fire of the habaneros that feature on almost every plate across West Africa, or the berbere that comes with every meal in Ethiopia and Eritrea, is never put on the table without its effect on the tongue fully considered. Sanza soothes their heat with a cool Inkomazi and beetroot smoothie. Sanza’s cheesy one-liners and flair for storytelling keep the atmosphere friendly and relaxed. Guests always end up on the balcony. Below us are Cameroonian, Congolese, and Nigerian restaurants. There’s a Ghanaian restaurant up the road, an Ethiopian spot, too. Sanza moved from Soweto to Yeoville in the late-1990s, witnessing the beginning of the suburb’s transformation from a previously white suburb to a multiracial one, and its current form as a Pan-African enclave where conversations in taxis are in our official languages, Amharic, Kiswahili, French, Sesotho, Igbo and Lingala.

He didn’t leave Yeoville when it stopped being hip. There would be no Yeoville Dinner Club if he had. His life wouldn’t have daily trips to the market where kale is muriwo to Zimbabweans and sukuma wiki to Kenyans. He wouldn’t know about the Senegalese community that taught him how to cook thieboudienne, their national dish. Cooking it to perfection takes the kind of practice you can only get from your neighbour. Had he left, there wouldn’t be mornings spent trading cooking tips and recipes; he wouldn’t start random conversations with people who want to share home the best way they know how – with a plate of food