This article first appeared in SAWUBONA magazine

November 2009

Unsure of how the ancient Romans would feel about their twenty-first century presence at Emperors Palace in Johannesburg, CHRIS THURMAN seeks out some African flavours at Tribes Grillhouse. 

There’s a wonderful moment in the recent film The Hangover in which, as the protagonists are checking into the Caesars Palace hotel in Las Vegas for a stag party, the groom-to-be’s oddball future brother-in-law asks: “This isn’t the real Caesar’s Palace, is it? I mean, did Caesar actually live here?”

The delicious irony in such a seemingly naïve question is a reminder of the great artifice of Vegas, where nothing is as it seems and, ultimately, nothing is real.

Walking around one of South Africa’s own shrines to the ‘unreal’, Emperors Palace Hotel, Casino and Convention Resort in Johannesburg – formerly known as Caesars Palace – I found myself wanting to make similar provocations. How, for example, is the health spa known as “Octavia’s Sensorium” linked to Octavia (sister of Caesar Augustus and wife of Mark Antony)? Did Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Roman consul in the second century BC, really give his blessing to the “Theatre of Marcellus”? Why is the smoking section on the casino floor called “The Velarium”?

Authenticity is hard to come by at Emperors Palace; certainly, it isn’t particularly ‘South African’. Fortunately, however, there is one corner that feels a bit more local: Tribes African Grillhouse. This restaurant offers patrons the chance to indulge in some fine southern African flavours fused with metropolitan cuisine, from Cape-inspired bobotie spring rolls to Maputo-style periperi chicken livers and from biltong salad to Inyoni Emnandi – chicken breast stuffed with feta and rocket, served with a balsamic and lemon sauce.

While Tribes does cater for vegetarians, it’s really a meat-eater’s restaurant: the Karoo lamb shank, ostrich carpaccio, Inyama platter (ribs, boerewors, beef kebab) and a range of beef and venison steaks are prominent on the menu.

There’s plenty on offer for vinophiles too, with a lengthy wine list from which to choose. We sat next to the upstairs wine cellar, admiring the rows of bottles of venerable vintage alongside us and looking down over the restaurant activity below.

Tribes has a number of these tucked-away spaces, catering either for individual diners or private groups. The names – Shona, Boma, Bayeti, Yoruba, Dogon, Masai – betray an admittedly touristic orientation, like the imitative ‘African’ décor elements, but the warm atmosphere at Tribes is tangibly South African.

The restaurant was established in 2000, a year or so after what was then called Caesars Gauteng opened its doors on the site of the old World Trade Centre, near the airport in the eastern reaches of Johannesburg. That is probably an appropriate date for the birth of a poly-African restaurant in a pseudo-Roman setting – after all, by the time the new millennium arrived, the fusion of unlikely opposites was embraced as a typically postmodern feature.

But if you think about it, Africa and the Roman empire weren’t very foreign to each other to start with.     

The few hundred kilometres between the southern tip of Italy and the north coast of Africa were no barrier to protracted interaction between the people of north Africa and their Roman counterparts. This was often, it must be said, antagonistic: Hannibal of Carthage – present day Tunisia – famously attempted to conquer Rome in the second century BC but was defeated by the Roman general Scipio Africanus (who, confusingly, wasn’t an African). And, of course, we all know about the unhappy relationship that the Egyptian queen Cleopatra had with ancient Rome ...

Many influential Roman soldiers, statesmen, writers and philosophers – and later, even a few popes and emperors – were ‘Moors’ who came from north Africa. The great theologian of the early Christian church, St Augustine, was a Berber from a place that is today in north-east Algeria. A few hundred years before him, a young man was taken from the same region to be a slave in Rome; he was freed and became known as Publius Terentius Afer, or ‘Terence’, one of the great Roman playwrights (he famously declared: “I am a man, so nothing that is human is alien to me”).

I don’t know what Augustine and Terence would make of the entertainment on offer at Emperors Palace. But I do have a sneaky feeling that, during the course of their visit, they would find their way to Tribes and trade their north African preferences for a South African culinary experience.

For Augustine, I think, the fall-off-the-bone oxtail; for Terence, the tender aged Fillet Ithambo. Of course, they’d have to supplement these with some mielie pap, a splash of chakalaka and perhaps some morogo on the side. And I’m sure that Augustine, being something of a hedonist and having quaffed a few glasses of Meerlust Merlot, wouldn’t be able to resist the chocolate mousse potjie for desert.

So next time you’re at Emperors Palace, staring at the faux statues and wondering what those toga-wearing Romans were really like, head over to Tribes African Grill – you never know who you may meet there.