Snoek
The Cape's own fish. Firm, rich and full of flavour, fried crisp and golden.
- Snoek & chipsR108
- One pieceR60
How it started
One night in 1976.
Every Gatsby in Cape Town goes back to one hungry night on Old Klipfontein Road. This is how Rashaad Pandy tells it.
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Athlone · 1976
Four men, one long night.
Rashaad Pandy had opened Super Fisheries two years before. One evening he hired four men to clear a plot of land, and by the time the work was done, everyone was starving.
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The kitchen
Nothing left in the house.
There was no proper meal to give them. So he made do with what was there: a round Portuguese loaf, slap chips, polony and atchar.
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The cut
Fill it, cut it, share it.
He opened the loaf, packed it with the lot and cut it into wedges so everyone got a piece. “It happened by accident,” he has said since.
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The name
“That's a Gatsby smash!”
One of the four, Froggie, took a bite and named it on the spot. The Great Gatsby, with Robert Redford, was showing at the bioscope across the road. The name stuck.
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The next day
Gone as fast as he made them.
The next morning he made a few for customers at the shop. They sold as fast as he could fill them, and the Gatsby has been on the board ever since.
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Later on
Round became long.
The round loaf became a long roll: easier to cut, easier to share. The rest of Cape Town caught on, and the Gatsby became the city's own.
Still the original.
Half a century on, Gatsbys are made all over the Cape Flats and beyond. This is where the first one was cut, and it's still made here, to order, at 63 Old Klipfontein Road.
As Mr Pandy told the Daily Maverick in 2013, and others since. Some details, like the exact year, vary from telling to telling.
Order the original
