If you have limited time but high expectations in the food and design department there is no smarter place to meet than at the Service Station in Melville.
Carmen Lee’s clever bistro has been servicing the creative-leaning lunch crowd there for 21 years.
The harvest table, which is laden to exacting and delicious standards at 12.30 every day, is the stuff of legend.
You cannot beat her quiche and you can be in and out in a flash, while the Tonic interiors (her husband Phillipe van der Merwe is one half of the renowned design studio) make for an aesthetically sleek feel that’s a pleasure on the eye.
Mandla Sibeko is a man on a mission this week so there is no more fitting environment to take our lunch in a snappy fashion while catching up on the joys of Joburg’s cultural landscape.
Mandla is a founding director of the FNB Art Fair — which opens on Thursday evening — and the brains behind Open City, an initiative launched last year during the epidemic. It is a rich programme of activities running until the September 9, celebrating 15 days of culture in the city.
He is also a father with three-month-old twins and a two-year-old daughter. So efficiency in all matters gustatorial is of the essence.
It feels like a wonderful gift to the cultural life of the city that the FNB Art Fair is back on this year.
The Open City is marvellous but the opening night of the fair has the joyous, energetic frisson of the best kind of cocktail party.
Joburg’s bon ton is out in full force — familiar faces, surprising pop-ups, continental visitors, and high-flying collectors. It’s the sort of party where air-kissing is an extreme sport.
Sometimes I come away realising I haven’t managed to move even five metres over the entire evening, making a return visit to see the art an imperative.
Mandla’s journey to being the urbane magician manipulating the levers of our cultural landscape starts in Katlehong where he was born. Primary education was in a rural village where the school had a dung floor — a sensory experience he still can summon with clarity — and a high school at a private institution in Johannesburg, courtesy of his mother’s employers.
His mother was as a domestic worker for a Jewish family who embraced him and his education. “I’ve lived in all these different worlds, as SA was getting out of apartheid, as it was emerging — my story, too, is of that person who was emerging with the SA you know.”
His relationship with service to the city dates to his days at school as the first black chairperson of the Joburg junior city council.
“The junior mayor and I would go for tea with the first black mayor of Joburg and be serious about things.”
He still emanates the qualities I imagine led to him being chosen for positions of leadership such as the board of loveLife while studying law at Wits.
The kind of young person who commands respect and was gifted with an abundance of can-do energy, which he attributes to his grandmother and the other maternal figures in his life.
The kind of person in whom great expectations are vested and who then makes good on them.
You want to be in a situation in life where you don’t feel like it’s a job
— Mandla Sibeko
“I remember being invited onto the Felicia Mabuza-Suttle show as part of the junior city council, all of us in our jackets, very serious.
"There is still footage of this and she remembers me from then, (she became a mentor and surrogate aunt to him) and she asked what do you want to be one day? I would always answer: an entrepreneur. I have been involved in many companies over the years.”
But his big break came from his visionary thinking about the 2010 World Cup, where he set up a company to do branding five years before the event and found a German company to partner with.
“It was an opportunity I never said I would get — but I said the World Cup is coming, what am I going to do?”
He also has boundless energy coupled with unusual levels of tenacity. He pursued the then owners of the Joburg Art Fair for several years.
“I eventually became a shareholder, got to learn about the workings of the art world, introduced myself to the art ecosystem — the art fair world looks very glamorous on the outside but there is a whole production pipeline that you need to learn — until I learnt enough to do it entirely on my own, and it became 100% black-owned.”
The art fair is just one of his babies, though. “I’ve been involved with many different things, at some point I was a shareholder and chairperson of NetFlorist. But now I have an agri-processing platform, which supplies retailers with food. That is the bread-and-butter part of my business and the art fair is the fun side of me.
“My philosophy has always remained the same: you want to be in a situation in life where you don’t feel like it’s a job.”
Is this attitude endemic to Mandla’s nature? “I have been told by the people who raised me that if I was given an opportunity I went for it. I played the piano, I dabbled in rugby, I played hockey — literally I was that guy who would take on anything. I was hungry.”
I try to get him to give me a scoop on which artists we should buy on Thursday night. Sadly, he is immensely diplomatic and tells me to visit the Lab section in the fair to find young emerging artists from the continent. You heard it here first.
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