51. Mzoli's Meat

Sunday 2 June

After a very rainy walk to church in the morning, and a few hours' attempt to work on my homework, I went with 9 of my friends for lunch to a restaurant called Mzoli's Meat. Mzoli's is a "restaurant" located in a Cape Flats township called Guguletu. The reason I put the word restaurant in quotes is because...well. Mzoli's is like no place I've ever been, like no other restaurant in the world.

Here's how Mzoli's works. You walk into a butcher shop type place. Keep in mind, this is in a township, so it's just one tiny building front of many corrugated tin buildings. And you point to cuts of meat that you want. There was a hefty portion of a pig...still identifiable as a pig...being artfully hacked into nice cuts of pork. There were a ton of chicken bones, thighs,  wings, etc. There were T-bone steaks and other kinds of meat. You just point and ask for how many of each cut. Neha and I ordered together, and we ordered so much meat. We got 4 chicken drumsticks and a giant T-bone steak and a couple smaller steaks...for about $8. Eight. Yeah. Just eight. Then we asked for bbq sauce, paid for our meat and ordered a piece of traditional bread to go with it. Then we took our platter of raw meat down a path behind the butcher shop to a shack with a ton of grills. We handed our platter to a man who then threw the meat on a grill. Then we went back out front and down the street a few doors to a giant red tent where there was basically a giant party going on. We sat down at a giant table and munched on our bread and samp and beans that we'd ordered and waited for our meat with our friends. There was a DJ, there were some other American students, including a guy that had transferred from Northwestern to USC. What???? 1) he's crazy. 2) small world! There were tables everywhere and rain coming in here and there. There were groups from Guguletu. The guy who picked me up at the airport the day I landed in Cape Town, on April 3...the first person I met in South Africa, Angus was there. There were like twenty kids from Guguletu under the age of 10 celebrating some little kid's birthday party. It was a crazy melting pot of people all coming together for a unique (or weekly if you live in Guguletu) cultural/life/culinary experience. After about thirty minutes, Neha and I went back and got our meat and then brought it to the tent and ate it. It was incredible!

We intended to leave after about two hours, but the place was so fun, and we were having such a great time that we decided to stay there for a while, we kept on munching on our food and then going and dancing and wandering around the vendors along the street. We ended up staying til 5pm. It was crazy. Like nothing I've never experienced (I feel like I say that a lot..but I guess that's the point of study abroad). I didn't bring my camera because I didn't think that was a good idea to bring my camera to a township...so unfortunately I have no pics, but I'm not even sure they could've captured the experience.