Within South Africa’s electric but mercurial restaurant industry, few have managed to find success amid uncertainty quite like Johannesburg chef créatif Bongani Eric Mphela. Though his name is yet to enter the mainstream culinary conversation, his relative obscurity feels increasingly temporary. In a city constantly searching for its next fixation, Eric Mphela is just the ticket.
Yet simply calling him a chef feels incomplete. Yes, he cooks, but his real medium is atmosphere. Through a series of kitchen takeovers at Johannesburg’s beloved, if short-lived, restaurants Acid Food & Wine Bar and Mother-In-Law; the pop-up dining concept My Table; recurring collaborations with fellow culinary artists; and highly coveted dinner parties attended by some of the city’s bright young creatives, Eric has positioned himself as an architect not only of good food, but of gathering.
“I love the idea that food brings people together,” he says.
Still, he talks about cooking with the pragmatism of someone who has spent enough time on the hot line to distrust convenient romanticism. And yet, at the centre of his work is a sincerity that might feel suspect were it not so clearly plated alongside everything he serves.
The Making of a Chef
Before taking London, Zanzibar, and Cape Town by storm, Eric grew up in Thembisa, east of Johannesburg, with his grandmother and mother. Like many chefs, his early relationship with food was shaped by proximity. At family gatherings, he naturally drifted towards the kitchen, where he studied the hands of the women — particularly his aunt — as they transformed flour into feeling.
After a brief stint at culinary school in 2019, he decided that the academic version of cooking lacked the momentum he craved. “I wanted to be in an actual kitchen, and just overall learn how it would function,” he adds. In his estimation, the real learning happened under pressure, and this impatience led to his first placement as an apprentice chef at Misty Hills in Muldersdrift.
At the end of three months, he set his sights on Cape Town and an apprenticeship at the iconic One&Only Hotel, drawn by its pace, international clientele, and coastal access, all of which promised an exacting kitchen environment. However, the month he started, the pandemic and lockdown sent him back to Joburg. It didn’t slow him down. By the end of 2020, he had returned to Cape Town — this time working under Chef Braam Beyers, whom he still credits as his most influential mentor.
Their connection began over Instagram — an appropriately contemporary origin story. Eric had been following Beyers’ work, initially drawn to the food, but just as intrigued by the fact that the chef posted spectacular dishes alongside Drake songs. For an aspiring chef, that combination resonated. “I thought he was so cool,” he recalls.
He persisted with messages until an opportunity finally came, leading to a commis position at Chef’s Warehouse at Tintswalo Atlantic, where Braam was head chef. Within two months, Eric was promoted, and again four months later, to chef de partie. By 20, he had already become a junior sous chef — an achievement impressive on paper, but more complicated in practice.
In nearly every kitchen he entered, he was the youngest — and often one of the few Black chefs in a position of authority. He speaks carefully about race in the industry, but is clear that geography matters. If Cape Town sharpened his technical foundation, travel broadened his palate.
A three-month seasonal stint as senior sous chef at Xanadu in Zanzibar brought Eric into closer contact with ingredients. Much of what he cooked came from the property itself, where a garden and small farm supplied the kitchen, and animals were slaughtered on-site almost daily. This shifted how he felt about food and the creativity behind it. “I felt really connected to the food,” he says.
After returning to Johannesburg, his career accelerated rapidly. He moved through kitchens quickly — taking on sous chef roles at Chef Luke Dale-Roberts’ Test Kitchen Carbon, then The Pot Luck Club, and later senior sous chef at Solo Sandton. Other opportunities followed with increasing frequency.
Rewriting the Rules of Dining
Still, he was drawn to the pop-up model and the broader language of kitchen takeovers that reshaped dining in the 2010s, and again in 2020, when even “ghost kitchens” entered the mainstream vocabulary of eating out. For Eric, it offered a measure of authorship that restaurant hierarchies rarely allow. As a senior in someone else’s kitchen, “you don’t fully get to express yourself or see how far you can take your craft,” he says.
His My Table series emerged from that logic, alongside demand that grew on Instagram through his cooking videos, with requests to move his cooking from screen to table filtering in. His first event was held in 2023 at The Artivist in Braamfontein, with a tasting menu with wine pairings, cocktails, and all the recognisable scaffolding of fine dining.
Since then, Eric has hosted a growing number of pop-ups, including a supper club at London’s hottest pizzeria, Dinner for One Hundred, with Chef Nandipha Motsa, which sold out within an hour. At the time, both were working at Kudu, a South African restaurant owned by Patrick Williams and Amy Corbin. The D4100 event was cooked largely in the venue’s pizza oven and open kitchen, pairing a Tabasco granita and uShatini with lamb and mackerel.
London’s density of diasporic food cultures made visible something Eric Mphela had long felt Johannesburg was still underutilising. His response was not to complain about the gap, but to seriously think about filling it. “I wanted to create my own story, and in the city I’m from,” he says.
The contrast with South Africa’s relatively narrow mainstream dining landscape made an impression. It partly explains his current culinary sensibility, which resists singularity. Asian food remains a particular obsession — strong enough that he later travelled to Thailand largely to eat and learn — but his references resist categorisation: French foundations, Eastern spice profiles, Asian techniques, and African ingredients.
Building Community Through Food
More recently, Eric launched Round Table, a recurring lunch series at Mamakashaka and Friends in Braamfontein, held on the first Sunday of every month until August. The format is straightforward, with chefs and creatives coming together for an afternoon he describes as “a once-in-a-lifetime experience”, shaped by a changing cuisine and featured chef.
South Africa’s creative and culinary scenes, he believes, still operate too frequently in silos or competitive isolation. Round Table attempts to remedy that — and it does so with dishes as scintillating as tamarind escabeche on the menu.
His ambitions, though expansive, remain unpretentious in articulation. Asked how he wants people to feel when they eat his food, he answers simply: “Happy.” It is an almost modest response for someone whose dinners function so beautifully as cultural ecosystems.
And that happiness is evident in the photos of his intimate dinner parties. He describes the formula — one he has down to a science — as great drinks, a strong theme, and carefully calibrated guest dynamics that matter as much as the menu. “Good vibes and good cooking,” he says.
What people return to most, though, is consistency, expressed through a through-line of care that remains constant, regardless of scale or setting. He connects through food, and each event, for all its structure, feels like the best parts of home. The plate matters, of course, but Chef Eric Mphela’s real offering is something you may not find in a walk-in fridge or pantry: community.
