Pieter Bauermeister for The New York Times
Clockwise from left: Yeshi Mekonnen at Little Ethiopia Restaurant; the Bo-Kaap neighborhood; Bebe Rose at her restaurant, called Bebe's; a dish at Little Ethiopia.
BEBE ROSE, a Cameroonian who owns Bebe's restaurant in Cape Town, stood with her arms folded and peered down with one brow raised as she scanned the plates of unfinished food spread out before me.
"What's the matter?" she asked. "You don't like my food?"
I did like her food. There were stews of kidney beans and okra, meat and starches. It was true that one item, the tripe, pushed my boundaries. In a shallow bath of a hearty brown sauce of ground nuts and red oil sat part of one of the four chambers of a cow's stomach, the rumen, or omasum, or perhaps the abomasum.
I couldn't be sure. I secured it to the dish with my fork and sawed it with my knife. Its flavor was rich and beefy, though it was more than chewy, kind of resistant, as if it hadn't decided yet if it was going to be eaten.
The problem, though, was that this was the last stop on a four-hour eating binge through central Cape Town, and my own sorry single-chamber organ was maxed out.
Not from sheer gluttony, though. I had found a novel way to explore Cape Town, a city that I had visited several times over the course of 20 years. A local company called Coffeebeans Routes offered to expose visitors to the city and its subcultures through a tour called the Cape Town Cuisine Route. Unlike many other culinary excursions, the goal is not to find the finest dining (there is no shortage of that) but to use food as an entry to the city's inner life, visiting home kitchens, alley cafes and markets otherwise easy to miss.
Cape Town, wedged between the towering sandstone mesa of Table Mountain and the Atlantic Ocean on Africa's southern tip, is marvelously scenic. From its establishment in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company, which created a settlement as a way station for ships bringing spices from Asia, the Cape Town city bowl, the aptly named metropolitan center, has been a stew of cultures like the indigenous Khoisan, Africans from the north, Europeans from the sea, slaves and indentured servants from Southeast Asia who would become known as the Cape Malay.
In the last decade or so, they have been joined by an influx from the rest of Africa — Malawi and Mali, Congo, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe — looking for refuge and opportunity. They have sometimes had to endure searing anti-immigrant sentiment. Nonetheless, they have set up shops and market stalls, changed the look of some streets and neighborhoods and brought recipes from home.
The Coffeebeans itinerary tells the story, a mouthful at a time, said my guide, Michael Letlala, 28, who came to Cape Town from the Eastern Cape.
Our first stop was the Escape Caffe, which has an extraordinary history: it is owned and operated by Muhammed Lameen Abdul-Malik, who was born in Nigeria, and opened the cafe after winning a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 as part of the International Atomic Energy Agency when Mohamed ElBaradei was the director general.
The clientele, and the baristas, looked like the South African counterparts to my regular cafe in Philadelphia. They are locals and expats, regulars and newcomers, the same set of people worldwide who know their piccolos and macchiatos, settling in at a long communal table in the middle of the cafe.
Although Cape Town already had a robust cafe scene before the arrival of Escape Caffe, few places had decent coffee. Mr. Abdul-Malik has endeavored to fix that. His coffee is great, and he has built a following of people who are prepared to pay considerably higher prices for it.
"Coffee beans are from Africa," Mr. Letlala said, as we sipped cortados from clear glasses. "And, anyway, coffee is a good palate cleanser before we begin eating. We will have a lot of food."
Having eaten very little before we started, I felt up to the task. We walked up the cobblestone street into the Bo-Kaap, the Cape Malay Quarter, with its view of bright pastel-colored homes running like a perspective painting up the incline of Signal Hill, and came to a spice shop. The Bo-Kaap, like so much of the area, is in transition. After hundreds of years of being exclusively Muslim (partly because of apartheid-era segregation laws), gentrification and rising demand, property and tax rates are changing the neighborhood, making it all rather a bit too SoHo for traditional residents.
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