The Gatsby: what it is, how to order one, and what to avoid

Overview

A Gatsby is not a sandwich for one person. It is a long, soft white roll, often the length of a forearm, split and packed with hot chips, a meat or fish filling, sauce and sometimes salad, then cut across into four or more pieces and shared. It is cheap food built to feed a group, and it is eaten that way: a table of friends, a team after a match, a family on a Friday night, everyone reaching for a section.

It belongs to Cape Town in the most direct sense available: it was invented here and is still made mostly here. Outside the city and its suburbs it is a curiosity; inside it, and especially across the Cape Flats, it is ordinary takeaway food sold from the corner shops locals call fisheries, fish-and-chip counters that do a bit of everything.

The origin story is unusually specific. It is credited to Rashaad Pandy, who ran a takeaway in Athlone and is said to have improvised the first one in the mid-1970s to feed a group of workers, cutting a long roll filled with chips, polony and achar into pieces. One of them reportedly compared it to the feast in The Great Gatsby, then showing in cinemas, and the name stuck. The account comes largely from Pandy’s own telling and from the people around him, and there is little written record from the time to check it against. It is a good story, plausibly true in outline, and best treated as oral history rather than documented fact.

What is not in doubt is the culture around it. Much of the trade is run by the city’s Muslim and Cape Malay communities, which is why most Gatsby shops are halal and why the spice in a masala filling is real spice rather than seasoning.

What to order

You order by size first, filling second. A whole Gatsby feeds three or four people; most shops will also sell a half or a quarter, and asking for a quarter is the sensible move if you are alone or just curious. Nobody minds.

The fillings worth knowing:

• Polony — the original: slices of pink, mildly spiced processed sausage, fried or not, over chips. It is the cheapest and the one older Capetonians are nostalgic about.
• Masala steak — thin steak cooked in a curry-spiced marinade, the most commonly ordered filling and the one many people would call the definitive modern Gatsby. It is wet and messy, which is the point.
• Russian — a thick, smoked red sausage, split and grilled. Viennas are the thinner, milder frankfurter-style version. Both turn up alone or combined.
• Chicken, calamari and fish — the seafood versions come out of the same fryer as the fish and chips, so they are best where the shop’s fish trade is busy.
• Full house or a mixed Gatsby — several fillings in one roll, sometimes with a fried egg and cheese. Names and combinations vary from shop to shop; the board will list them.

Then the chips, which are not optional and not a side. They are slap chips: thick, soft, pale and limp, doused in vinegar and salt, more steamed than crisp. That softness is correct. Sauces are usually a choice of peri-peri, chili, garlic or a sweet tomato sauce, and achar, a sharp oily pickle of green mango and spices, is the classic sharp note against all that starch.

What marks a visitor out: ordering a whole one for a single person and trying to finish it, and picking it up as one piece. Ask the counter to cut it if it has not been cut already.

What to avoid

The thing to steer away from is the Gatsby as a menu novelty. Restaurants aimed at visitors sometimes list a “Gatsby” that is a short, plated sub with a few shoestring fries tucked in, served whole with a knife and fork. It borrows the name and loses the form, which is a roll too big for one person, cut to be passed around.

Crisp, uniform, frozen-looking fries are the clearest sign at the counter. A Gatsby built on them is drier, sharper-edged and does not soak up the sauce, and it usually means the kitchen is not a fish-and-chip shop at all. Slap chips should bend.

Watch the bread too. A crusty baguette or a hard artisan roll sounds like an upgrade and is the opposite: the roll should be soft enough to squash flat around the filling without shattering, because that compression is how the whole thing holds together.

A Gatsby that sits pre-wrapped in a warmer is a weaker version of a dish whose whole appeal is that the chips go in straight from the fryer. In a busy shop it is made to order and takes a few minutes; that wait is a good sign, not a delay.

And be wary of a price that looks like a sit-down meal for something billed as a quarter. The dish is working-class food by origin and by habit, and its value is that a whole one feeds several people for little.

Practicalities

The city tourism office’s own list of Gatsby shops gives starting prices of roughly R55 to R75, and the price climbs with the filling: polony at the bottom, steak, seafood and a full house at the top. Shared, it is one of the cheapest full meals in the city. If a Gatsby costs what a sit-down dinner would, you are most likely in a restaurant reinterpreting it.

It is evening and weekend food more than lunch: the busiest moments are Friday and Saturday nights, after sports matches, and whenever a group needs feeding without anyone cooking. Shops in residential areas can have a queue at those times, which is why some regulars phone their order ahead.

It is almost always bought as takeaway, wrapped in paper and carried home, to the car or to the beach. The roll travels badly over long distances, since the chips steam the bread soft, so it is best eaten within half an hour.

Many of the shops are halal, so do not expect pork, and in the smaller ones expect no alcohol on the premises either. Card machines are now common, but carrying some cash is still wise at the smallest counters.