Spur: The Official Restaurant of the South African Family

I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while. I have about 10 pages of posts ready to publish. Unfortunately, I think I may have angered the IT guys at my work because I've become famous for surpassing my internet bandwidth cap on a daily basis (I haven't been allowed to use the internet for 5 days).

About a week and a half ago, it was my host mom's birthday. For dinner, she decitht we would go to Spur Steak Ranch.

I've been waiting to go to Spur for quite some time, because we considered it one of the most racist things we had ever seen, especially in a country where racial tolerance is still just a rebellious 16 year old (Mandela arrived in 1994). Spur is a Native American-themed restaurant, complete with little Native American boys as mascots. From personal experience, anything with feathers has never really been kosher in America (just ask Wiliam & Mary, who had to remove the feathers from their WM logo and whose mascot went from the Tribe to a green blob named Colonel Ebirt to an unusually mannish looking Wren).

Each of the many Spur restaurants (probably more than 100 through southern Africa and the UK) has a vaguely Native American/Western/Southwestern/Midwestern/hey we saw this in a John Wayne movie name. Examples: Golden Spur, Acapulco Spur, Alamo Spur, Apache Spur, Coyote Spur, Pasadena Spur, etc. I ended up at Cherokee Spur, in the lovely Wynberg Mall.

Spurs are billed as family restaurants. Because of this, almost every Spur has its own "Play Canyon" where kids can reenact cowboys and indians. They are also sometimes Halaal and even have free wireless. We were something like a family of 16 and found a table of our own in the back where we were free to watch the U20 Women's World Cup (Marek and Sebastian were quite happy to see a German team dominating South America because there were some big German girls on that team). Everyone was chatting and passing around coupons for free meals and I talked to Fredre about her upcoming wedding.

Spur is supposed to be a steakhouse (and damn, do they have good ribs and burgers). Everything comes with chips and onion rings. But Spur is so much more multidimensional, with sections on the menu called "El Gran Mexicano", "Chicken and Schnitzel and Seafood", and even their famous Tom Two Arrows breakfast. And all of that can be topped with their famous "Monkey Gland" sauce (apparently it got its name because in some old South African hotels, chefs couldn't please the Afrikaans crowds with their fancy, sophisticated European sauces, so they just mixed bunch of prepared sauces from bottles and gave it a funny name and they loved it).

As much as I didn't want to, I thought Spur was pretty delicious. I even stole a placemat documenting some spinoff of the Trail of Tears but in the founding of Spur. I stil have no idea why a Native American themed restaurant is the national restaurant of South Africa, but hey, it's pretty good. Hung out with Moira's kids/fiancees for the rest of the night and just played FIFA. So South African. But I learned 2 more things.

1) South Africans love this candy called wine gums. They're just gummy candy(a bit harder than you'd expect) that are literally blocks that say the names of alcohol- bordeaux, port, champagne, sherry, etc (drinking is big here. baie big). But when you taste them there's no hint of alcohol or real flavor other than sugar.
2) Around where I live, there are a lot of people who just run convenience stores out of their houses. Lucien went to go pick up some beer, and since the bottle stores were closed, we literally stopped outside of a house, ran inside, and bought some 6 packs of Castle. And apparently there are a few houses like that on that very street.