Bunny chow from Britannia Hotel
* My entry for the Sunday Times AA Gill Award for emerging food writing *
Nobody goes to the Britannia Hotel to stay at the Britannia Hotel. There is no welcome drink, no garlanded greeting, no spa, no minibar, no bathrobes, no slippers, no kettle, no coffee machine and no view. It’s in that sort of semi-industrial part of town where every second shop sells mattresses but nobody can sleep at night. A motorway overpass slaps concrete slabs and diesel fumes across the face of the hotel, as if to signal to passers-by that this is a place only worth passing by.
Yet the parking lot is always full. Both the official one and the ad hoc one on the traffic island opposite that seems to sprout an assortment of banker Benzes and lowered-suspension Subarus like weeds poking through the paving.
They come for the bunny chows – that ultimate and most enduring of Durban street foods – an unbeatable combination of a bland white bread loaf filled with an intoxicatingly complex curry. A dozen other travel guide blurbs and pieces-to-camera would, at this point, cut to a sepia-tinted photo montage outlining the history of the dish and its supposed origins in a segregated South Africa. But so much has been said, a lot of it apocryphal, that to repeat it here would be to take a detour past the Britannia itself. And we’re going to make a stop, just as my family and half of Durban always does.
Slipping into Britannia’s underground bar feels like stepping into a saloon in a Wild West town. You move from the saturated Durban light to near darkness, from the sickening humidity outside to the aggressively airconditioned inside, from the wide smiles and laughs among family to a dozen ’70s-moustached characters lurking in unswept corners sipping dark spirits at 11am. Heads turn in your direction, then turn back towards the endless loop of Premier League football projected on a screen that takes up a whole wall.
The laminated menu touches on all the classics of Durban Indian food (think South Indian, add some heat, subtract the coconut). Sticky fingerprints point any newcomer in the direction of some of the favourites, but really, if you’re there, it’s to order a ‘quarter mutton’.
Britannia’s is the best because they understand that a bunny is as much a feat of engineering as cooking. The quarter loaf of bread must, MUST be of the generic, mass produced sort (not a farmhouse loaf, definitely not a milk bread, just standard unsliced white) with the light crust a dam wall holding in a reservoir of rich mutton curry that’s Stockholm Syndroming massive potato halves, the sauce riveted with cloves and singing to the tune of ginger and curry leaves, and the whole edible edifice capped with a dome built of the belly of the bread.
It is, as all the best dishes are, a study in contrasts, the sedate, spongy bread a counterpoint to the shouty, lanolin-funky curry within. It’s a conversation-stopping, digging-in sort of beast, the kind that demands a pile of napkins and a practised hand to tackle. For my family and me, there’s now a muscle memory, hand-mouth co-ordination to it, starting with the ‘virgin’ – the crust-less wedge of bread crowning the whole thing – before moving on to break off pieces of the walls as we diligently work our way round, spiralling towards the spice-sodden bottom and a nap. For us, there’s nothing like it. Our Proustian madeleine comes hollowed out and ladled with fragrant mutton fat.
Growing up, it used to be that this, a lowly Indian creole food born of hard times and soft bread, was something that only our community cared for, and even then it was just the younger generations who could see past its working class origins. But with just a single glance around Britannia these days, it’s clear how much has changed. Where once most white people and black people wouldn’t go near it, the bunny chow has now become, almost 30 years since our walls came down, part of the shared culinary lexicon of the city. It was inevitable, really. The bread and the curry may start off apart, but they merge into something better.