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New ZealandFlavors · Durban
Curry served inside a sliced loaf of white bread cut into a quarter or half and hollowed out, with the removed crumb placed on top. Created by Durban’s community of Indian origin, it’s the dish the city uses to introduce itself.
Traditional dish from Durban, KwaZulu-Natal
Also known as: bunny
Illustrative images. The pictures in this guide are illustrations based on the real place, not photographs, and may differ from it.
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Bunny chow — Durban, South Africa
The bunny chow, or simply bunny, is a white loaf of sandwich bread cut into a quarter or a half, hollowed out and filled with curry. The crumb that’s removed is placed back on top as a lid and used as a scoop for the sauce. You order by size and filling: a quarter mutton, for example, is a quarter loaf with lamb curry.
Durban curry is made with oil, lots of tomato, fresh chili and curry leaves—redder and spicier than many Indian curries. The traditional filling is lamb, but there are chicken, bean and vegetable bunnies, always with potato. According to the city’s cooks, the earliest ones were bean.
Durban’s Indian-origin community formed from the 19th century onward with laborers brought to the Natal sugarcane plantations and merchants who came later. There are several versions of the bunny chow’s origin. The most repeated links the name to the banias, the Indian merchants who sold curry in downtown shops; others mention packed bread meals for the Indian caddies at the city’s golf course, or takeaway food sold to people who couldn’t enter restaurants during apartheid. Linguist Rajend Mesthrie and other researchers think the dish emerged after World War II.
Durban’s tourism board treats the bunny chow as a city emblem, and the province even holds an annual best-bunny contest. It’s eaten with the hands, tearing the sides of the bread to get the curry, and served with a small salad of grated carrot, cucumber and tomato.
Durban , KwaZulu-Natal
Created by Durban’s community of Indian origin; the city’s tourism board treats it as a signature dish.
White sandwich bread; lamb, chicken, bean or vegetable curry made with oil, tomato, onion, fresh chili, curry leaves and spices, always with potato; small grated-carrot salad.
With your hands. The removed crumb is used to scoop the sauce, then you tear the sides of the bread soaked in curry. It’s served with a small salad of carrot, cucumber and tomato.
All year round, at lunch, as takeaway food.
Your questions
A loaf of sandwich bread cut into a quarter or half, hollowed out and filled with curry, with the crumb on top. It is Durban’s best-known dish, created by the city’s community of Indian origin.
There is no certainty. The most repeated explanation links bunny to the banias, the Indian merchants who sold curry in Durban; chow is slang for food.
By size and by filling. A quarter mutton, for example, is a quarter loaf with lamb curry; there are also half loaves and fillings such as chicken, beans and vegetables.
With your hands. The removed crumb is used to scoop the sauce, and then the sides of the bread are torn. It’s served with a small grated-carrot salad.
Flavors of South Africa
Stew of mutton or lamb with waterblommetjie flowers, an aquatic plant native to the Western Cape, onion, potato and sorrel. It is a winter dish, made in the short season when the flowers are harvested from the province's lakes and marshes.
Cracked white maize (samp) slow-cooked with beans until creamy, seasoned with onion and butter or fat. It is the everyday dish of the Xhosa of the Eastern Cape and was Nelson Mandela's favorite.
Minced meat seasoned with curry and spices, mixed with bread soaked in milk and dried fruit and baked under a milk-and-egg topping. It is a well-known dish of Cape Malay cuisine from Cape Town, served with yellow rice and chutney.
A long roll filled with fries, meat, fish, or chicken, salad and sauce, cut into pieces for sharing. It originated in a fried-fish shop in Athlone, in the Cape Flats, and is Cape Town’s sandwich.
Fried dumpling with a soft dough, seasoned with cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, fennel and tangerine peel, dipped in hot syrup and coated in coconut. It is the Sunday breakfast of Cape Malay families in Cape Town.
A hot amber-colored beverage made from the oxidized leaves of a shrub that only grows in the Cederberg mountains and surrounding areas. Clanwilliam, at the foot of the range, is the center of cultivation and processing, and the name rooibos has a protected geographical indication.
A quarter loaf of sliced white bread hollowed out and layered with fillings: fries, sausages, mortadella, a burger, cheese, achar and sauces. It’s the street food of Johannesburg’s townships, like Soweto, and of the whole Gauteng province.
Homemade fermented drink made from the juice of marula fruits, from January to March. In Limpopo, the season opens with the festival of the first fruits, and Phalaborwa hosts the annual marula festival where the drink made by local cooperatives is served.
Pinotage red wine, a grape variety created in Stellenbosch, South Africa, from crossing Pinot Noir with Cinsaut (which in the Cape was called Hermitage). It has a dark color, aromas of red and dark fruits, and soft tannins.
