| LEKGOTLA, Joburg's newest African-theme restaurant, is in a prime position – Nelson Mandela Square, previously Sandton Square – and easy to find, with drummers outside luring customers into premises designed as a hut and named for a meeting place. There are cowhides on the floor, Kuba clothes on the chairbacks and young, friendly and efficient waitrons with the best smiles you'll find anywhere in the city.
It has the usual extras: a woman comes around with vanilla-scented water for hand-washing, another offers to paint your face, a young mbira musician serenades the diners. Large parties can rent a mini-lekgotla on casters, a private hut of their own big enough for eight or 10 people.
The food is more North African than south, especially when it comes to the starters – the house salad includes fresh mint and caramalised onions; the hummus bi tahini and baba ghanoush are first-rate; and tagines loom large among the mains.
On the other hand, although lamb shanks with prunes is listed under tagines, so is that South African mainstay, oxtail braised with red wine and beer, and there is an excellent baked butternut with dhal rice and tofu fritters for vegetarians – not the sort of dish one would expect to encounter in, say, Morocco. The baby chicken peri-peri filled with wild rice, apricots and dhal is, according to diners, "hotter than the surface of the sun".
Game is offered, along with linefish, Karoo lamb and a number of beef dishes – entrecote, roast rib of barbecue beef and Botswana roast beef fillet in banana leaves among them. The menu includes grilled Mozambique tiger prawns, at R285 the most expensive item, twice the price of the nearest main course.
Starters cost from R26 to R48, and main courses between R58 and R110, unless you're a fan of prawn curry, which runs to R180. Desserts still need a bit of work; if you do go for them, they'll pay somewhere in the early R30s.
There is a R100 minimum per person, and a 10 percent service charge on tables of six or more. Oh yes, and the menu notes, ever so tactfully, that there are no substitutions.
Lekgotla is owned by a trio of partners who have run restaurants in the area for years: Allan Pick, who owns the highly successful Butcher Shop on the other side of the square; Ernst Fisher, whose Thai restaurants include Wangthai, also on the square; and the Kunene Brothers of Ocean Basket and Pitti Piazzi. That expertise is apparent at Lekgotla, which seems to have been successful from the moment it opened in October 2005.
Nelson Mandela Square, Sandton Telephone: 011 884 9555 Website: www.lekgotla.com Hours: Lunch and dinner Mondays to Sundays
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