Food Experiences Worth Trying in Cape Town

The Cape Malay cooking class is the single best-value food experience in the city. You cook in the Bo-Kaap, usually in a home rather than a school, you make the things the neighbourhood actually eats, and then you sit down and eat them.

It runs about half a day and it changes how everything else you eat that week reads. If you are only going to do one thing on this page, do this one first rather than last.

Taste of Cape Town walks a small group through the centre and feeds them along the way, which is the efficient way to cover ground you would otherwise spend three days finding.

The Bean to Bar experience at AFRIKOA takes the other approach entirely and goes deep on one thing: cocoa, from the bean through roasting and conching to the finished bar. It is a better hour than it sounds and it is the one that works with older children.

The best wine experiences in the Cape are the ones that put something on the table next to the glass. Waterford pairs its wines with chocolate and runs a vineyard safari into the hills behind the estate. Fairview pairs with its own goat’s milk cheese and has the goat tower to keep anyone under ten occupied. Babylonstoren feeds you out of its own eight-acre garden.

If you would rather not drive, there are two answers. A Cape Winelands wine tour takes the whole problem away for a day. The Franschhoek Wine Tram does it on rails, hopping between estates on a loop, which is slower and considerably more fun.

The market is the food experience Cape Town does better than anywhere else in the country, and it is the cheapest thing on this page. Time Out Market at the Waterfront and Mojo Market in Sea Point run every day. Oranjezicht City Farm Market, Neighbourgoods at the Old Biscuit Mill and Bay Harbour Market in Hout Bay are weekend affairs and worth planning around.

The method is the same everywhere: do not commit to the first stall, walk the whole thing once, then eat in three or four small rounds. Greenmarket Square is the exception on this list, being craft rather than food, but it is two minutes from the rest of the city centre.