Cape Town is an old city with a surprisingly young restaurant scene. Most of what people think of as its dining institutions arrived after 1990. Here is what came before, where De Waterkant fits, and why this particular street has been feeding people for longer than almost anywhere else in the city.
De Waterkant sits on the lower slope of Signal Hill, looking out over Table Bay, wedged between the Bo-Kaap above it and the harbour below. Its history runs back to the 1700s, and it forms part of the broader Bo-Kaap area — the oldest residential quarter in Cape Town, where the first houses were built in the 1760s.
That is genuinely old for a South African city, and yet comparatively little has been documented about De Waterkant’s own architectural and cultural history compared with the Bo-Kaap’s. The cobbled lanes, the narrow flat-fronted terraces and the steep stairways cut into the hillside all predate almost every business currently trading on them.
What that means in practice: when you walk from the Bo-Kaap down through De Waterkant to the harbour, you are walking a route people have walked for roughly two hundred and fifty years. The bars are new. The street is not.
The first houses go up on the slopes of Signal Hill, in what becomes Cape Town’s oldest residential area. Its Cape Malay cooking traditions — bobotie, denningvleis, curries brought and adapted over generations — are the deepest culinary roots the city has, and they are still being cooked in the same streets today.
The neighbourhood forms on the slope below, between the Bo-Kaap and the working harbour. For most of its life it is residential and industrial rather than a dining destination.
Restaurateur Emiliano Sandri opens La Perla on Waterkant Street — one of the first restaurants to properly stir up the Cape Town dining scene, and among the oldest names still spoken about in the city. It puts this street on the map decades before the precinct around it becomes fashionable.
In the year of South Africa’s first democratic election, Cafe Manhattan opens as Africa’s first LGBTQI+ owned and operated bar and kitchen. Thirty-two years later it is still on the same corner — and is now routinely listed among Cape Town’s oldest continuously trading bars. Read the full story.
De Waterkant fills in as a village: restaurants, bars, small shops. Most of what is trading there today opened after this point, which is why a bar from 1994 counts as an elder in the neighbourhood.
The three oldest layers of Cape Town’s food culture sit within about twenty minutes’ walk of each other, and the walk is downhill in the right order.
The walk works in reverse too, but you will be going uphill and we will have already sold you a drink.
Claims about the oldest anything in Cape Town should be treated carefully. Venues close and reopen under the same name, change address, or trade continuously but change hands so often that the thread is hard to follow. What we can say for our own part is specific and checkable: Cafe Manhattan has operated continuously at 74 Waterkant Street since 1994, under the same name, in the same room.
A bar that has been open for thirty-two years has been through recessions, load-shedding, a pandemic and several complete turnovers of what the city considers fashionable. What survives that is rarely the best-lit place on the street. It is usually the one that got the boring things right and kept doing them.
74 Waterkant Street · open 11am to 11pm daily · 021 002 8867
The Bo-Kaap is the city's oldest residential area, with the first houses built in the 1760s on the slopes of Signal Hill. De Waterkant, on the slope below it, has a history running back to the 1700s.
De Waterkant's history dates back to the 1700s and it forms part of the broader Bo-Kaap area. Its cobbled lanes, terraced houses and hillside stairways substantially predate the restaurants and bars trading there now.
La Perla, opened on Waterkant Street in 1957 by restaurateur Emiliano Sandri, is among the oldest and was one of the first restaurants to shape the modern Cape Town dining scene. Cafe Manhattan has traded on the same street since 1994.
Since 1994 — thirty-two years at 74 Waterkant Street, under the same name and in the same room. It opened as Africa's first LGBTQI+ owned and operated bar and kitchen.
We are on the corner at 74 Waterkant Street, thirty-two years in, open every day from eleven.