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5 Reasons To Visit Johannesburg

Thinking of skipping the golden city of Johannesburg when you visit South Africa? Think again. Joburg is hip, happening and worthy of at least three days.

Vendor at Maboneng Market in Johannesbrrg
Eating at Market on Main in Maboneng is a must for food travelers in Johannesburg. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

Don’t visit Johannesburg.

We kept hearing this warning from other travelers during our first two months in South Africa. Instead of scaring us away, these warnings made us curious about the capital city of South Africa. Then, after various chefs and winemakers spoke well about the food scene in Joburg, we really wanted to check the city out.

Long story short – we ended up spending three days in Johannesburg South Africa and wished we had more days to explore Africa’s fourth largest city. (FYI, Lagos is the continent’s largest city with a population of a whopping 21 million residents.)

This short visit was just enough time to give us a taste of the city’s offerings and left us wanting more.

South Africa’s Golden City

Nelson Mandela Square in Johannesburg South Africa
An impressive six-meter Nelson Mandela statue stands guard at Nelson Mandela Square. The bronze statue weighs 2.5 tons, so theft is not an issue. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

Thriving for years as a boomtown after the discovery of gold in 1866, the golden city of Johannesburg lost much of its luster in the latter half of the 20th century when Apartheid defined the city and separated its races. Global businesses stayed away, rendering the city depressed and unsafe.

In other words, Joburg rightfully earned a bad reputation that kept tourists away. This bad reputation made us wary to visit Joburg.

After being victims of crime in Cape Town, we seriously considered driving straight to the airport after our three safaris and flying straight to New York. That’s what most tourists do. But we’re not most tourists.

We wanted to experience the maligned city and its food scene for ourselves. Plus, after falling in love with the Cape Town coffee culture, we were curious about Joburg’s coffee shops.

Craft Coffee Shop in Johannesburg South Africa
The third wave coffee scene is alive and well in Johannesburg. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

So what happened?

Obviously, we made it out alive since we’re writing this article now. Beyond our survival without having to use our travel insurance even once, we discovered a cosmopolitan metropolis with more multiculturalism than any other city we visited in the country. We found diversity in the city’s people as well as its cuisine, and we felt at home in the busy city environment.

Don’t get us wrong – Joburg isn’t perfect. Like all big cities around the world, it has sketchy areas and its fair share of crime.

Despite this lack of perfection, or perhaps because of it, we connected with the edginess that shines through the city’s street art and permeates its public markets. We ate well, we slept well and we learned a lot during our visit.

Our only regret about visiting Joburg is that we didn’t have more time to spend in the city.

Why You Should Visit Johannesburg South Africa

Maboneng Music Class in Johannesburg South Africa
The streets of Johannesburg are alive with culture. We bumped into this music class in Maboneng. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

We were wondering what to do in Johannesburg and were pleasantly surprised to find a wide selection of things to do in Joburg. As tourists, we could have spent our few days doing activities in Johannesburg like drinking pints of brew at local breweries and bungee jumping off of the Orlando Towers.

We’re all for fun, but there’s so much more to do in the city. Plus, let’s face it, we’re not really bungee jumping adventure travelers.

Sure, we had fun during our visit, but we didn’t stop at the popular Johannesburg attractions. We rolled up our sleeves and discovered the soul of the city. Here are the five aspects of Johannesburg that resonated with us and that we’ll remember forever:

1. Johannesburg Vibe

Maboneng in Johannesburg South Africa
Johannesburg has an active outdoor culture thanks to its favorable climate. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

There’s no way around it. Johannesburg is a hip city. Residents walk with attitude and swag. These cool cats can’t even be bothered to call the city by its proper name or even by its shortened name. They just call it Jozie, like the happenin’ friend down the block.

Rosebank Statue in Johannesburg South Africa
We bumped into this interesting sculpture during a stroll in the Key Art Mile Precinct in Rosebank. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

In many ways, Joburg reminded us of Los Angeles.

The city sprawls from neighborhood to neighborhood. The weather is mild on a year-round basis.

And, if you have money to spend, there are plenty of stores for you to shop for designer clothes and signature art pieces. Not all of the shopping is expensive though, as we found while shopping at Arts on Main in Maboneng where vendors sell colorful handicrafts for affordable prices.

Maboneng Vendor in Johannesburg South Africa
Maboneng has a slew of street vendors selling handicrafts for reasonable prices. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

But Johannesburg is its own city with its own character and personality.

Older residents lived through Apartheid, and many were victims of its discrimination either directly or through friends and family members. Remnants of this period still exist in the city, serving as monuments to a darker time without defining the city today or holding back its people from moving forward. We saw this resilience in street art and shining through the people we met during our visit.

2. Johannesburg People

Tour Guide Willy Kalala in Johannesburg South Africa
More than just an accomplished Johannesburg tourism professional, Willy Kalala is highly knowledgeable about Johannesburg and can carry two coffees in one hand. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

Diversity in the people is the first thing that struck us in Johannesburg.

Johannesburg travel guide Willy Kalala picked us up at the airport and welcomed us with open arms and colorful stories. Originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kalala’s international background is not unusual in Johannesburg, a city that attracts people from other parts of the country, throughout the African continent and from all of the world.

Even our charming host was born in Scotland. She came to Joburg for a holiday decades ago and never went home. We met expats everywhere we went in the city, though we also met plenty of natives who were proudly born and bred in Joburg.

Constitution Hill Tour Guide in Johannesburg South Africa
Constitution Hill Museum Tour Guide Collen (Khaorisa) Baloyi guided us through the former prison and provided an insightful look into South Africa’s dark history of racial struggle during Apartheid. The former prison is one of the top places to visit in Johannesburg. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

Warm, Proud and Friendly. These are just some of the adjectives we can use to describe the people we met throughout the city.

Like Kalala, the people of Joburg were anxious to show us their City of Gold literally built on gold mines. Perhaps this welcoming spirit is part of the city’s culture or perhaps it’s due to the relatively smaller number of tourists who spend time in Johannesburg before jetting off to a safari or the Garden Route.

Maboneng Guitar Student in Johannesburg South Africa
The younger generation is the future of Johannesburg. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

What excites us most is to see where the younger generation takes the city. This generation did not grow up during Apartheid, and they live in a city where the races blend together more so than we experienced anywhere else in the rest of the country. Hopefully, the city’s financial center will continue to grow, lifting the city and its people to levels we can only imagine.

Pro Tip
Don’t be afraid to travel to Johannesburg with children. Although the city much to offer sophisticated travelers, there are a lot of fun things to do with kids in Joburg.

3. Johannesburg Food Scene

Marble Grill Chef in Johannesburg South Africa
Wondering what to eat in Johannesburg? The city has a wide range of cuisine at all price points. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

Though our visit was too short for us to do a thorough exploration of the restaurants in Johannesburg, we ate enough to know that the city’s food scene is for real. Though not as developed as the Cape Town food scene, Joburg food has it going on at all levels.

Fine Dining

Steak at Marble in Johannesburg South Africa
We ate this steak at Marble Restaurant after the grill master prepared it on the restaurant’s open grill. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

Thanks to favorable exchange rates, most tourists will find the fine dining in Johannesburg to be refreshingly affordable. These same tourists will also find the city’s upscale restaurants to be culinarily exciting with a focus on service that is missing in much of the world.

We first heard about Joburg’s high-end dining scene during our dinner at FABER in the Cape Winelands where we got recommendations for Marble Restaurant and Restaurant Mosaic. Both of these Johannesburg restaurants are serving exciting food in elegant spaces. We chose to eat at Marble.

Marble Restaurant takes its fine dining experience in a different direction with a live-fire grill and open kitchen. Despite its down-and-dirty, modern approach to grilling pictured above, Marble offers a true luxury dining experience in the Rosebank neighborhood with a chic decor and impressive, glass-enclosed wine cellar.

Impala Rump Tartare at Clico Restaurant in Johannesburg South Africa
This Impala Rump Tartare was our favorite dish at Clico Restaurant. Surrounded by dots of orange puree and salsa verde and topped with a confit egg yolk, the tartare was both specific to South Africa and creative at the same time. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

Interestingly, many of the top Johannesburg restaurants are located in hotels. We dined at Clico Restaurant at Clico Boutique Hotel during our two-night stay at the tony Rosebank hotel. Here, Chef Marnus Scholly takes his safari culinary experiences to new heights with creative cooking at the highest level.

Seriously, eating Scholly’s six-course meal paired with South African wine was a highlight of our visit in Johannesburg. Every course was a winner – especially the Impala Rump Tartare served with orange puree, confit egg yolk and salsa verde and paired with glasses of Faithful Hound wine from Stellenbosch.

Neighborhood Restaurants

Pasta at Bottega in Johannesburg South Africa
Bottega Cafe, one of many popular Johannesburg restaurants in the Parkhurst neighborhood, serves comforting Italian food and South African wine for reasonable prices. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

Johannesburg is a city of neighborhoods, and many of the best Johannesburg restaurants can be found in neighborhoods like Parkhurst where we ate pasta on a bustling restaurant row.

The gentrifying neighborhoods of Braamfontein and Maboneng have a large concentration of privately owned restaurants, many of them multicultural like CHE Argentine Grill, Mama Mexicana and Soul Souvlaki.

And then there’s the booming township of Soweto with its wide selection of restaurants serving some of the best local food in the area.

Food Markets

Maboneng Food Market in Johannesburg South Africa
We ate this bunny chow at Market on Main in Maboneng. It’s the next best thing to eating the dish in Durban. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

Sometimes we find our favorite food at markets where we dine while standing up and eat food on plastic plates. Such was the case in Johannesburg at Market on Main in Maboneng. This Sunday market has all kinds of savory food like Durban bunny chow and Ethiopian injera as well as sweet treats like CocoaFair bars from the Cape Town chocolate factory.

The premier food market in Joburg, Market on Main is a great spot to sample lots of local food and also to people watch. Other markets worth a visit include the Jozi Real Food Market on Saturdays and the Rosebank Rooftop Market on Sundays.

Pro Tip
If you can’t get to Market on Main on a Sunday, go to the city’s best market on the first Thursday night of the month. Eating at this market is like taking a condensed Johannesburg food tour.

Coffee Shops

Craft Coffee in Johannesburg South Africa
Daryl is fully charged after drinking a flat white at Craft Coffee. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

Not surprisingly, finding a good cappuccino was our priority one when we arrived in Johannesburg. Similar to Cape Town but on a smaller scale, Joburg has a thriving coffee culture. Our problem wasn’t finding a good coffee shop – it was narrowing down the choices.

Bean There Coffee in Johannesburg South Africa
We had to try the coffee at Bean There after drinking the coffee during our second safari in South Africa. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

We drank solid cappuccinos at Bean There Coffee Company, Father Coffee and Origin Coffee Roasting. We had expected good coffee at Bean There, a local stalwart, since we had already enjoyed their coffee at &Beyond Kirkman’s Kamp and at Clico Boutique Hotel, as well as at Cape Town’s Origin Coffee. But it was Craft Coffee, a local South African roastery, that truly wowed us with its commitment to beans from the farm all the way to the cup.

Craft Coffee Roaster in Johannesburg South Africa
Craft Coffee’s Japhet Matimbe honed his “craft” at his father’s coffee farm. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

Craft Coffee has all of the bells and whistles that are typical in specialty coffee shops around the world, but it also has a true sense of place. As we sipped naturally sweet flat whites that had been crafted to order with Guatemalan beans in an Aeropress coffee maker, we were as pleased as punch to be in the heart of Joburg’s Newtown neighborhood.

4. Johannesburg History

There’s no way around it – Johannesburg has an ugly history related to Apartheid. Instead of shying away from its storied past, Joburg shines a light on it. The result is both highly educational and utterly fascinating. More importantly, this attention on history will hopefully keep the past from repeating itself.

Constitution Hill Jail Cells in Johannesburg South Africa
The isolation rooms at Constitution Hill were chilling to see in person. During Apartheid, prisoners spent 23 hours a day inside these cells. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

We got our introduction to the city’s history at Constitution Hill with Zulu music before entering the former prison that began as a fort. We toured dilapidated cells where we saw remnants of the inhumane conditions that political prisoners like Nelson Mandela experienced during their incarcerations.

Food was rationed to prisoners based on skin color. Conditions in the prison were so crowded that inmates were forced to sleep on top of each other. Solitary cells were so confining that prisoners could never fully stretch their bodies from end to end. Cells would flood with unsanitary wastewater.

Harrowing and grim, the prison tour was necessary for us to understand the city’s history and the sheer will of humans to survive oppression. Equally important, nearby Constitution Hall shows how far the city has come with its artistic, transparent design and an open court that enforces the nation’s recently passed equality laws meant to protect all citizens. If you’re looking at different Johannesburg tours, this is the one to take.

Regina Mundi Church in Johannesburg South Africa
The Regina Mundi church is both an active church and a historical site. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

To garner an even better understanding of the city’s history, we spent a day in Soweto, the massive township located inside Johannesburg. An abbreviation of SOuth WEstern TOwnship, Soweto is the township where two Nobel prize winners, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, lived down the block from each other. It’s also the township where the Regina Mundi church, with Tutu as its pastor, played a pivotal role in the end of Apartheid.

5. Johannesburg Itself

Maboneng Street Scene in Johannesburg South Africa
Don’t blink! Johannesburg is experiencing rapid gentrification. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

You could spend your days in museums learning about Johannesburg. You’d surely learn a lot on this type of Johannesburg city tour, but you’d miss out on the soul of the city. We felt the soul as we drove and walked through the city streets but mostly when we spoke to the friendly locals.

Pro Tip
Although walking around Johannesburg is as safe as walking in any other big city during the day, you should take Uber to get around at night. The global car service is a popular, inexpensive transportation option in South Africa.

Maboneng Gentrification in Johannesburg South Africa
The street art on this Maboneng building showcases Nelson Mandela from his boxing days. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

We were struck by the rampant gentrification in Johannesburg. Loft buildings are popping up next to shacks. Those shacks won’t be there for long now that real estate prices are on the rise. Joburg residents are proud of this development – and who can blame them for enjoying a better quality of life.

Maboneng Street Art in Johannesburg South Africa
We bumped into this street art while walking to Market on Main in Maboneng. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

Colorful street art fills the city streets, painted on buildings and street barricades. Some of the art is for art’s sake while much of it carries a message. A tourist could easily spend a day in Johannesburg searching for street art and photographing the city’s colorful murals.

Pro Tip
The OR Tambo Airport has great souvenir options including cute t-shirts and colorful handcrafted jewelry, so don’t spend your time limited searching for Johannesburg souvenirs. Instead, use your time to explore and enjoy the city.

Maboneng Street Art in Johannesburg South Africa
We weren’t looking for street art in Johannesburg, but we kept finding it anyway. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

We’re glad we didn’t listen to our fellow travelers and that we gave Johannesburg a chance. Our reward was a fun, educational three-day adventure.

We left Johannesburg smarter than when we arrived, inspired by what we had experienced and hopeful for a return visit sooner than later. We also got the opportunity to experience a real day-to-day piece of modern South Africa – a worthy bookend to our monumental trip before we departed the country for our next adventure.

Plan Your Johannesburg Trip

Clico Hotel in Johannesburg South Africa
Clico Boutique Hotel is a great place to stay during a Johannesburg visit. | Image: ©2foodtrippers

Have we convinced you to visit Johannesburg during your South Africa dream vacation?

We stayed at an apartment for one night and at Clico Boutique Hotel for two nights. We recommend both of these Johannesburg accommodation options if you’re wondering where to stay in Johannesburg. Both are good bases for Johannesburg sightseeing visits.

Johannesburg Planning Checklist

Hungry For More In South Africa?

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Garden Route
Lunch at The Table at De Meye in Stellenbosch
Stellenbosch
About The Authors

About The Authors

Daryl & Mindi Hirsch

Saveur Magazine’s BEST TRAVEL BLOG award winners Daryl and Mindi Hirsch share their culinary travel experiences and recipes on the 2foodtrippers website. Since launching the site in 2012, they’ve traveled to over 40 countries in their quest to bring readers their unique taste of the world.

Disclosures

Article Updates
We update our articles regularly. Some updates are major while others are minor link changes and spelling corrections. Let us know if you see anything that needs to be updated in this article.

Sponsorship
We thank Joburg Tourism for hosting us to facilitate this article.

Original Publication Date: August 30, 2017

Clifford

Friday 3rd of December 2021

Thank you for shinning a positive light on Johannesburg I had the same reservations about the place, having been told to not visit It wasn't until I was offered a job there and relocated to Johannesburg that i came to appreciate what a great place it was. I always recommend travelers to South Africa to treat it, not just as a flight stopover, but as part of the trip. Every city in South Africa has poverty and crime. Every city also has beautiful places in it. I don't know why Johannesburg always sticks out as this awful place, it simply isn't true. Johannesburg is the most diverse city in South Africa, and probably all of Africa?, It has the best energy and hands down, the nicest people

Willy

Thursday 5th of October 2017

Many Thanks Food Trippers for such a nice Blog full of positive stories of Joburg. I will always say this and repeat it again, your Trip or holiday to South Africa will never be complete if you miss to visit "Jozi". I am Willy Kalala, the storyteller, you just need an expert guide to make you enjoy , explore and discover the city. Thank Darry

Daryl and Mindi Hirsch

Monday 9th of October 2017

You're so welcome Willy! It was our pleasure to be guided so expertly around Joburg. We hope you and your family are doing great. If we ever travel back to Joburg, we'll be sure to look you up so we can share some beers and fellowship!!

ashylnmolly

Tuesday 3rd of October 2017

Johannesburg is an awesome place.I love to visit there.Thanks for sharing this article with us.

jessicahische

Tuesday 26th of September 2017

I went South Africa for two times but never visit Johannesburg.Next time definitely visits Johannesburg.Thanks for sharing this article with us.

Ryan Biddulph

Tuesday 5th of September 2017

Jo-Burg is an intriguing place guys. We house sat with a South African travel blogging couple in Bali a few years ago. These guys suggested a trip thru the region to enjoy fine food, drink and to soak up the local culture. Ditto Rhonda's comment above. I have never felt unsafe during my 6 years of circling the globe, living in cities or rural areas, walking home at 2 AM sometimes. Yep a few weeks before we began traveling, a kid was shot on the front steps of the library in my American hometown. Travel guys!

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