South African Chefs to Watch: The Names Shaping What We Eat Now

There has never been a more exciting moment to eat in South Africa. Not just because the restaurants are better — though they are — but because the conversation happening inside them has deepened in a way that feels genuinely new. Chefs are not just cooking food; they are telling stories, excavating heritage, challenging inherited assumptions about what fine dining looks like and whose culinary traditions deserve to sit at the centre of it. The result is a food culture that is increasingly confident, increasingly global, and entirely its own.

Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen

No list of South African chefs is complete without Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen — and at this point, no list of the world's great chefs is complete without him either. The Middelburg-born chef became the first South African to earn a Michelin star, awarded to his Restaurant JAN in Nice, France, where it has now been held for more than a decade.

Restaurant JAN has received its Michelin star for ten consecutive years, celebrating a decade as part of the French Michelin brigade. His approach — blending French classical technique with the flavours, textures, and storytelling of his South African heritage — has proven that South African food belongs in the world's most celebrated dining rooms. Dishes like biltong with truffle and Amarula panna cotta carry the particular quality of a cuisine that is both deeply personal and entirely at home in an international context.

In December 2025, Le Bistrot de JAN Cape Town opened at the V&A Waterfront's InterContinental Table Bay, and was named Bistro of the Year at the 2026 Luxe Restaurant Awards. JAN Franschhoek, meanwhile, was awarded two Luxe stars in both 2025 and 2026. The return of Jan Hendrik to South African soil — in multiple forms — signals that his story is far from finished.

Mmabatho Molefe

Chef Mmabatho Molefe celebrates Zulu and Nguni cuisine by paying homage to her fondest childhood food memories, indigenous African ingredients, and the concept of nose-to-tail dining. Honoured by The World's 50 Best, 50 Next edition, the talented chef was recognised as one of 'The Young People Shaping the Future of Gastronomy' in 2022.

Molefe's project is as much cultural as it is culinary. She has, almost single-handedly, placed modern Zulu cuisine on the international fine-dining map — demonstrating that the traditions of the Nguni kitchen can be elevated, contextualised, and celebrated in ways that are visually arresting and technically rigorous without losing the soul that makes them worth celebrating in the first place. "What we are trying to achieve is inclusivity and it's the perfect time for that. For a while, traditional African cuisine in South Africa was seen as something that couldn't be fine dining but in the past two years, I have had the honour to meet a lot of young black creatives passionately sharing their food and stories."

While Emazulwini has since closed its doors at Makers Landing, Molefe continues to shape South Africa's culinary landscape through collaborations and pop-up dining experiences, including her Long Table with Friends. Watch this space.

Ryan Cole

Ryan Cole, the head chef and co-owner of Salsify at the Roundhouse, is known for his deep connection to South Africa's nature and foraged produce. He is also, arguably, one of the most generous and collaborative figures in the South African food scene — a chef who understands that the rising of one tide lifts all boats.

His annual "Salsify & Friends" series has become one of the most anticipated events on the Cape Town food calendar, inviting chefs including Johannes Richter, Mmabatho Molefe, Vusi Ndlovu, Kobus van der Merwe, Luke Dale Roberts, Ivor Jones, and Dale Stevens into his kitchen to collaborate on seasonal menus. The resulting meals celebrate both the individual chefs' identities and the collaborative energy of a food scene that is at its best when it builds together.

Cole's cooking is rooted in the Western Cape landscape — in foraged ingredients, seasonal produce, and an understanding of place that makes each dish feel not just delicious but situated. He is a chef's chef, and his influence on the next generation of South African cooks is already quietly immense.

Wandile Mabaso

Wandile Mabaso is a revolutionist of modern African food. He blends high-level French techniques, honed under icons like Alain Ducasse, with local influences at his Bryanston restaurant Les Créatifs.

The Soweto-born chef's trajectory is a story of extraordinary persistence. His father disapproved of cooking as a career after high school; Mabaso studied hotel management instead, but did not let it deter him. After securing an internship on board an Italian chartered boat, he enrolled in culinary school and eventually found his way to Paris, where he worked at Le Meurice under Alain Ducasse — one of the most prestigious kitchens in the world. He returned home in 2019 and opened Les Créatifs, which has since become one of Johannesburg's most lauded fine-dining addresses.

Mabaso earned the Luxe Restaurant Award for Chef of the Year in 2022, serving up what critics describe as masterful French cuisine with a South African soul. His collaborations — including a celebrated joint service with Mmabatho Molefe and the "Roots: Humble Riches" series with Johannes Richter — demonstrate a chef who is as invested in the broader conversation of South African food as he is in his own kitchen.

Vusi Ndlovu

From manning the egg station at The Sheraton Pretoria's training programme in 2010, to winning the San Pellegrino Young Chef 2018 Africa and Middle East semi-final and opening Edge in 2021, Vusi's trajectory is impressive. A founding member of the African Culinary Library, the through-line in his cooking has been his boundary-pushing use of indigenous ingredients, underpinned by technical expertise.

Ndlovu now owns MLILO 'Fires of Africa,' a restaurant by EDGE Group, which highlights the complex flavours of African cuisine. The name is apt. There is something elemental and alive about Ndlovu's cooking — a sense that fire, both literal and philosophical, is at the heart of what he does. He is a chef who has committed entirely to the project of celebrating African ingredients, African techniques, and African stories in a way that is technically unimpeachable and deeply personal.

Callan Austin

Callan Austin is a leader in conscious gastronomy and co-founder of DUSK in Stellenbosch, where he focuses on sustainable, fermentation-driven and immersive tasting experiences.

Austin represents the next evolution of South African fine dining — one in which the farm is not just a source of ingredients but a philosophy, in which fermentation is not a trend but a commitment, and in which the tasting experience is conceived as something genuinely immersive rather than merely sequential. DUSK has quickly established itself as one of the most talked-about dining experiences in the Winelands, and Austin is one of the most interesting young chefs working in the country today.

Moses Moloi

Moses Moloi, the 2024 Best Chef in South Africa winner and co-owner of GIGI Restaurant, is celebrated for his contemporary South African flair and previously earned two EatOut stars during his time at Zioux.

Moloi's win at the South Africa Restaurant Awards was not simply a recognition of technical excellence but of a broader vision — one that holds that contemporary South African food can be joyful, accessible, and serious at the same time. His trajectory, from the prestigious Zioux to his current work at GIGI, is that of a chef growing into his own voice, and the result is food that feels both of its moment and entirely its own.

Katlego Mlambo

Katlego Mlambo has led the kitchen at Marabi Club, which won African Restaurant of the Year at the Luxe Awards, and presented two Food Network shows — Inside Job and Everyday Wow — while developing his company Alles Gut. He also serves as a judge on MasterChef South Africa, where his ability to communicate the principles of great cooking to a broad audience makes him as important to the development of South African food culture as his restaurant work.

Mlambo represents a generation of South African chefs for whom the kitchen is only part of the brief. Television, entrepreneurship, cultural advocacy — these are as much a part of his work as what happens at the stove, and the cumulative effect of that broader presence on how South Africans think about food and cooking is significant.

A Scene in Full Bloom

What unites these chefs — beyond their individual excellence — is a shared understanding that South African food is a living, evolving, deeply complex tradition that deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. Not as a derivative of French cuisine, not as a curiosity in the global food conversation, but as a culinary culture with its own history, its own ingredients, its own techniques, and its own stories to tell.

As international interest in African cuisine continues to grow, and as awards platforms continue to spotlight South African talent to a global audience, the country's culinary identity is becoming increasingly visible to the world.

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