Cape Town aims for greatness

TEN years is a lot in South African time. If you saw the country a decade ago, visiting it now is, in many ways, like seeing it for the first time.

These days, Cape Town’s Woodstock district, where you’ll find Albert Road — a charmless stretch of auto-repair shops, faceless light-industrial buildings draped in razor wire, scrap dealers and shuttered fast-food joints — is the hot new thing. On Saturday mornings, you can hop a cab from your hotel for the couple-mile ride out from the city center and join a well-dressed mob for the weekly food market that’s held inside a decommissioned mill complex.

Greg Beadle

CYCLE BACK: The colorful streets of Bo-Kaap.

Everything about the Neighbourgoods Market is over the top and surprising. The crowds begin to pour in the moment the doors open up at 9 a.m.; rustic communal tables are the staging area for consumption of the vast array of food on offer. This is a serious farmers market, to be sure, but more than that, this is an event — almost like a nightclub, but in broad daylight. For about $10, you can get a half-dozen juicy local oysters, harvested up on the Cape’s West Coast; for about half that you can find someone who will sell you a glass of local bubbly.

Everyone sits at the long tables, where empty wine bottles serve as holders for blazing white candles and cute girls mill around offering samples of things like smoked fish. "Would you like a taste of our tarte flambee?" (Yes you would, cheers!)

There are prawns on skewers, spiced hot wine, a local coffee roaster has lines around the block for its cheap and perfect lattes. You can get freshly made mozzarella, homemade Merguez sausages, croissants like you’ve never seen, fruit tarts, a back of unbelievably tasty dried Namibian sirloin beef for $4 — just ask for the biltong guy.

The market is just the start of a visit to Woodstock — pay a visit to the Old Biscuit Mill, which houses numerous design shops, art galleries and other very cutting-edge businesses. Out in Albert Road, just a few blocks away, the organizers of the market have opened a hopelessly chic little café called Superette, which you have to be buzzed into. Once inside, you find a spare but appealing space filled with people eating Eggs Benedict and sipping on strong coffee. The whole thing is very Brooklyn-ish, which is really kind of odd when you consider that to get here from New York City it takes about 24 hours of travel time. Welcome to the Global Village, population everybody.

The last decade has been kind to Cape Town, as kind as time can be to any city with the kind of problems — violence, poverty, bitter labor strikes, you name it — that it and South Africa as a whole are saddled with. In spite of everything, this city has always been one of the most beautiful cities on the continent and perhaps in the world. As such, it is the top destination for visitors to Africa.