Nick Hamman shaking hands with the owner of Solly's Corner - Yunus Akhalwaya
I’ve been going to Solly’s Corner for the better part of a decade. You can arrive with a plan to order one thing and leave having eaten three. That’s partly because Uncle Yunus Akhalwaya knows exactly how to talk you into his hake. Mostly, it’s because this little corner in Fordsburg has a way of making you feel like you belong there.
The story begins in 1956, when Yunus’s mother, Khadija, opened a takeaway at Avenue Road and Lover’s Walk. She called it Zulfikaars. Nearby was Red Square, once a gathering place for political meetings, music and community life. Food and history have always occupied the same few streets here.
Then apartheid’s Group Areas Act and the construction of the Oriental Plaza uprooted the family’s business. Yunus remembers their furniture and equipment being put out on the street. They bought another small shop and kept its existing name, Solly’s Corner, while his brother was due a place in the Plaza. It was a practical decision in a system designed to make staying in business difficult. Seven decades on, the name is still above the door.
Sandwich preperation at Solly's Corner
But you don’t come here for a history lesson alone. You come for a parcel: hot chips under gravy, with hake, polony, steak and viennas jostling for space. You come for the hake made to his father’s recipe, and for chips so good Yunus calls this place the “university of chips”. He isn’t short of confidence. After eating them, neither am I.
Workers peeling potatos for the fries
The toasted steak sandwich deserves its own pilgrimage. Steak, cheese and chips are already a very strong argument, but it’s the piccalilli that gets me: that sharp, curried tang cutting through all the richness. I’ve been hooked for years. Uncle Yunus has a point when he says a place like this has to know how to make a proper toasted steak sandwich.
There are stories in the queue, too. Yunus remembers Winnie Mandela stopping for hake and Zindzi loving the polony special. Generations of ordinary Joburgers have their own Solly’s orders and their own reasons for coming back. That’s how a takeaway becomes part of a city’s memory.
On Women’s Day in 2022, a fire gutted the front of the shop. The family lost photographs of regulars and people who had passed on: a history you couldn’t simply rebuild with bricks. Yet Solly’s reopened. Yunus’s son is learning the business now, another generation taking its turn behind the counter.
Recently, Uncle Yunus and I put a sandwich called the Nick Hamman on the menu. It’s a gloriously excessive toasted bun packed with masala chips, polony, steak, cheese, red onion, gherkin and sauce. I’m obviously biased, and usually covered in that sauce, but it is stupidly good. More than that, being invited to add one small chapter to Solly’s story means the world to me.
Go hungry. Order the hake. Try the chips. Talk to the people. The food will bring you in; the feeling of this place will bring you back.
The Nick Hamman at Solly's Corner
Watch the Hammy Eats episode on Solly's Corner here:
Read more from Nick Hamman here.