Cape Town, SOUTH AFRICA – The GOLD restaurant in Cape Town offers more than a meal.
It’s a special experience, providing African food from all over the continent and interactive activities such as drumming, Mali puppets and dancing. We visited as part of the Youth Journalism International 2025 Global Conference in Cape Town.
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While the activities immersed us into African culture, the presentation of the food was a major part of the evening.
For people who eat vegetarian, halal or gluten free, this versatile restaurant offers special dishes, welcoming people with differing tastes and special diets.
GOLD operates by serving 14 very different dishes. With each round, the food got more and more complex. A lovely trait about this restaurant is that the servers can refill the dishes if you want at any time.
The first starter of the night was a South African tomato soup, filled with many spices like green chilies, garlic and ginger. The soup was served alongside pot bread made of sweet corn, and Cape Town Snoek Pâté, which is a hummus-like dish made with cream cheese and herbs.
The lamb sambosa was so good and the taste of both the lamb meat and samosa layers were amazing.
Then they served us the peri peri grilled chicken. Peri peri means spicy, and the chicken was nice. We liked it because the spices they used were different and unique.
The main course was a mix of three different plates: deer meat with special sauce, ostrich salad, Ethiopian rice with vegetables, and shrimp with peanut sauce.
The deer meat was surprisingly delicious and full of flavor. It was our first time to try it and now we’re in love with it.
The ostrich salad was also delicious and tasted like steak. It was our first time to try ostrich, too and it was really good and tasty.
The Ethiopian rice was tasty and the spices they used were wonderful. The shrimp with peanut was not our favorite, although some of our friends found it really delicious and flavorful.
As for the vegetarian options, the restaurant presented a dish called Malawi kandola balls, which were sweet potato balls that contained cheddar cheese, rolled in sesame seeds.
The Ethiopian pilau rice cooked with spices and herbs was also a delight, as it could’ve been paired with any other dish to elevate the taste. The specific spices used were Berbere, a mixture of warming spices, and chilli peppers.
They ended up serving the appetizers with the chicken pie which was great and really tasty but we couldn’t really feel the texture or taste of the pie in it. Still, overall it was delicious.
An alternative, vegetarian option to the Cape Chicken Pie was the lentil pie, with lentil filling rather than chicken which was flavorful in contrast with the crispy phyllo shell surrounding it.
A beetroot cake finished the night off, with sweet dipping sauce laid on top and seasonal fruit skewers on the side.
It was a phenomenal finish, as the cake wasn’t too sweet but also not too bitter.
You also could’ve eaten the fruit skewers with the sweet dipping sauce if you wanted your fruit a little sweeter.
We left GOLD with our hearts and stomachs full of African culture – the mixture of singing, dancing, drumming and food made for an amazing evening.
Shiara Naveen is a Senior Reporter with Youth Journalism International from the United States.
Ahmed Elkhamisy is a Reporter with Youth Journalism International from Egypt.
They wrote this review together.
Mayama Opare of Ghana and Annamika Konkola of the United States, both Senior Reporters with Youth Journalism International, contributed video reporting.
Akhona Alwar is a Junior Reporter and Senior Illustrator with Youth Journalism International from South Africa. She contributed a photo for this story.
Click on the logo below for more from YJI’s 2025 Global Conference in Cape Town:
