On the weekend of September 4 to 6, The Pavilion shopping centre in Durban swapped its storefronts for more than 75 stalls selling street food, crafts, and lifestyle goods. It was the latest edition of the Durban Street Food Festival, an event that has grown, year after year, into one of the most popular on South Africa’s east coast.
The undisputed star of the festival remains bunny chow. Born in Durban’s Indian community, this dish is a hollowed-out loaf of bread — a quarter, a half, or a whole loaf depending on appetite — filled with a generous curry, eaten by hand with the bread used to scoop up the sauce. This year it shared the spotlight with gourmet burgers, seafood pasta, Indian street classics, Asian specialties, and even Italian pizza and fresh pasta.
The festival doesn’t stop at the plate. On the music side, South African group Mafikizolo and musician Muzi headlined, joined by local acts including the KZN Youth Orchestra. New for 2026: a rugby fan park, where the Springboks were shown on a big screen on Saturday, September 5, right next to the food stalls and drinks area.
This kind of format, blending street food with live music and sport, has little left in common with a simple lineup of food trucks. People show up for a match or a concert and leave having discovered a dish they might not have known — in this case, bunny chow, a local star still too rarely exported outside South Africa.
Behind its beaches, Durban remains one of the most compelling homes of Indo-African cuisine. This festival, a little busier every year, is a pretty effective reminder of that.