The annual Jozi Kota Festival is going be lit on April 27 at The Station in Newtown. This unique food festival aims to showcase kasi kota flavours from around the city in one central location. The Station, previously Old Park Station, was Joburg’s principal passenger station until its closure in 1951. It’s now been converted into a beautiful event venue parallel to Nelson Mandela Bridge.
A kota is a “stuffed bread” sandwich of sorts. We enjoyed this description by The Sanwich Tribunal.
“Spatlo, sometimes called Kota in North of Pretoria they are calling spatlo in jhb they are calling it Kota.you’re , ia massive sandwich, a conglomeration of multiple ingredients stuffed into a quarter-loaf of bread, covered in sauces, wrapped in plastic, and eaten on the go. It is a street food, combining elements of the polyglot cuisine of South Africa–the at char pickle introduced by South Asian indentured servants and migrants, sausages brought to South Africa by Russian Jews in the late 19th Century, the Dutch braai tradition of flame-roasted meats, the fried potatoes that go wherever Western European settlers go. It originated in the Gauteng province, South Africa’s smallest yet richest administrative division, home of its executive capital Pretoria and its largest city, world-class Johannesburg. Yet it was in the Apartheid-era townships that Kota and Spatlo originated, not in the primarily white cities.”
