Above famous Rockey Street, behind an unassuming door, a long table awaits. The room is dense with memory. Photographs, framed press clippings, fragments of a career that moved from radio studios to restaurant kitchens. No white cloth. No curated minimalism. Glasses stand ready along the table, simple and practical. We remain on our feet at first, circling, reading the colourful walls.
“I know how to smuggle all these whities back into Yeoville.” – Sanza Sandile
There were five of us going that night, though Sandra and I had shared the Uber. When I confirmed the destination, the driver turned slightly in his seat. “Yeoville?” he asked, just to be sure. The second look came then, weighted with the city’s accumulated caution. I carried that glance up the staircase with me.
I had been to Yeoville before, part of the Joburg iteration of the 24-Hour Project, cameras in hand, when the attention we drew on the pavement felt less like curiosity and more like calculation. We left with a sense of unease that afternoon. The memory stayed with me.
"Yeoville reveals itself as what it has long been: porous. A place where accents fold into one another like spices in a shared pot."
At the Yeoville Dinner Club, Sanza Sandile moves through the room greeting each of us with unmistakable warmth. Not clients. Guests. We begin standing, glasses in hand, with a homemade ginger cooler sharpened by a dash of rum, its heat blooming slowly at the back of my throat. He begins with a story. Growing up in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, he watched “black uncles who dressed well in the city”. Men who carried occasion in their posture, who understood something about urban belonging he was still decoding. He wanted to know who they were, why their lives seemed expansive. That curiosity became method.
Before food, there was radio, YFM in its city-shaping years. He learned early how to hold a room.
When we take our seats, he smiles and offers, almost conspiratorially, “I know how to smuggle all these whities back into Yeoville.” Laughter rises, quick and unguarded. Around me sits the city in miniature. The remark does not seek absolution. It names history and moves through it. The table itself is evidence.
Seating is deliberate. Friends are dispersed, including my own. I find myself far from the group I arrived with.
To my left sits an Italian now living in South Africa, describing elaborate house parties he organises in Sandton, evenings that pull artists and corporate professionals into the same orbit. To my right is the boyfriend of the woman beside him, she an intern at the Danish embassy navigating her first extended stay abroad. Diagonally across from me, an Egyptian friend of the Italian leans in and out of our exchanges. Yeoville reveals itself as what it has long been: porous. A place where accents fold into one another like spices in a shared pot.
“I mix dishes that are blasphemous to mix.” – Sanza Sandile
Plates arrive without ceremony but with intention, set down together for us to share. Cassava leaves sit in a deep peanut sauce, folded through with coconut butter beans that temper the earthiness with quiet sweetness. Mozambican smoked red snapper rests alongside them, firm and fragrant, dressed in fermented vinegar and peri-peri that cuts through the smoke. Hibiscus iced tea laced with sweet brandy moves between glasses alongside various wines, its floral brightness lifting the richer notes of the meal.
Sanza Sandile dismantles culinary borders as deliberately as social ones. “I mix dishes that are blasphemous to mix,” he says, relishing the raised eyebrows.
Photo: Ryan Enslin.
The Yeoville Dinner Club is not nostalgia dressed as hospitality; it is an argument for proximity in a fractured city. Johannesburg runs on separation, electric fences humming above extended garden walls, WhatsApp neighbourhood alerts pinging insistently, cars looping between garage and office park without thought. We move through the city sealed off, security signs warning trespassers, rehearsing what we have heard about places we rarely enter. Here, insulation collapses.
Sit down. Share a meal. Listen.
His reach extends far beyond Rocky Street. Sanza has staged pop-ups and collaborations in Europe and the United States, introducing pan-African menus to rooms that prefer their Africa simplified. He refuses that simplification. He plates migration, memory, contradiction. He returns here not out of necessity but conviction. Yeoville is his axis.
"When we step back onto Rockey Street later that night, Yeoville feels inhabited. Specific. The long table has done its work."
As wine softens edges, the room alters. The Danish intern speaks about adjusting to South Africa’s scale and volatility, her eyes bright, the excitement complicated by hesitation. The Italian describes bringing sceptical friends to previous dinners who left embarrassed by how little they had known. Bowls are refilled. Stories overlap. The distance that accompanied that early confirmation of our destination thins.
I had arrived believing my caution was discernment. Somewhere between the red snapper and the laughter, it revealed itself as habit.
By dessert, the table holds a warmth built through proximity. Conversation travels across accents and geographies without flattening difference. No one retreats.
When Sandra and I step back onto Rockey Street later that night, Yeoville no longer carries the outline I had imposed on it. It feels inhabited. Specific. The long table has done its work, not as decoration but as a necessary interruption. It has unsettled easy narratives and replaced them with encounter.
In a city practised at avoidance, Sanza Sandile has constructed a counterpoint. Sit here, he insists. Eat. Stay long enough for the story of a place to complicate the one you arrived with.
BOOK A SEAT AT THE TABLE
Visit yeovilledinnerclub.com or follow on Instagram and Facebook for upcoming events.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan Enslin had his start in chartered accounting before pursuing travel, photography, and writing. His work is shaped by moments he's gathered across the globe, while remaining rooted in Joburg. Enslin's website offers the full sweep of his writing and photography, and his Instagram @my_lime_boots captures the smaller details.
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