Illovo Johannesburg: Oxford Road Restaurants and Wanderers Cricket

Illovo is one of Johannesburg's most consistently excellent dining precincts, a neighbourhood of tree-lined streets in the northern suburbs whose Oxford Road and Fricker Road commercial corridors support a concentration of quality restaurants, wine bars and café-delis that rival anything available in the southern hemisphere. The neighbourhood's character is set by its proximity to the Wanderers Cricket Club — the spiritual home of Johannesburg cricket and a historic ground where international Test matches have been played since 1956 — and by its residential stock of mid-century homes and apartments that house a professional population with high disposable income and serious expectations of their local dining options.

The restaurant culture along Oxford Road encompasses the full range of Johannesburg's culinary ambition: from the traditional South African steakhouse tradition represented by places like the Wanderers Club's own dining room to the newer generation of contemporary international restaurants that engage with Japanese, Italian, Middle Eastern and new-wave South African cooking with equal enthusiasm. The neighbourhood's wine culture is particularly strong, with several specialist wine merchants and bar-restaurants focused on South African and European natural wine operating within the same few blocks. The Rosebank and Parkwood gallery districts are a short walk away, creating a natural circuit of culture and dining.

The Wanderers Taxi Rank area adjacent to the cricket ground has sustained a parallel street food economy of African cooking — grilled chicken feet, pap and vleis, vetkoek and various township staples — that creates an interesting juxtaposition with the neighbourhood's upmarket restaurant scene. Johannesburg's social geography has always been more complex than its reputation for racial and economic segregation suggests, and the Illovo-Wanderers precinct, where the taxi rank economy and the fine dining corridor exist within 200 metres of each other, is one of the more interesting examples of this complexity made visible. The Wanderers cricket ground itself is worth visiting for a Test match or a One Day International, where the Bullring's famous atmosphere and the South African passion for the game create one of the finest live cricket experiences in the world.