Meet the twins bringing South African flavors to San Francisco

How a World Cup-themed birthday party became the Bay Area’s only South African restaurant.

When South Africa hosted the World Cup in 2010, Pam and Wendy Drew, twin sisters from Durban, saw it as the perfect opportunity to host a tournament-themed birthday party. As students and au pairs living in San Francisco, they had an extensive network of friends with whom to share flavors from their home country—a mix of Indigenous, European, and Indian flavors and cooking techniques, melded over centuries to create a distinct national cuisine.

There was one small problem. “When I went online to go find a caterer, I couldn't find anybody,” Wendy says. “That meant we had to make our own food.”

They spent days prepping and cooking vetkoek—airy, savory fried dough filled with curried beef; Cape Malay rice—fragrant with turmeric, cinnamon, and green cardamom; chicken samosas, and koeksisters—spiced doughnuts topped with coconut flakes. Each dish they served was a hit. “Everybody just went crazy over the food. They kept asking where they could find South African food, but we started to do our research and there was actually nothing,” Pam says. “We decided to do more research and see if we should open our own spot.”

Owning a restaurant wasn’t part of the twins’ plans. They worked in banking prior to moving to the U.S. “We were getting our business degrees, so we thought we were going back to South Africa and joining the corporate world,” Wendy says. 

A full-fledged operation

Three years later, the idea that spawned from a spirited birthday celebration morphed into Amawele’s South African Kitchen. Amawele’s—named for the Zulu word meaning “the twins”—debuted in the Rincon Center in San Francisco's Financial District as a lunch-only operation. Pam and Wendy soon realized that catering was more profitable, but they didn’t have the bandwidth to simultaneously offer corporate catering and operate a restaurant. 

Then, a renovation at the Center gave them an unlikely opportunity to transition to catering, as the Center’s owners wanted to move Amawele’s to a different part of the building until renovations were complete. The twins saw this as their chance to ask for a lease buyout and transition to a commissary kitchen to start catering. “At first, they didn’t want to buy us out of our lease, then they realized it was going to cost a lot of money to move us somewhere else,” Pam says. 

That was in August 2019. As luck would have it, the timing was perfect. “I guess we had foresight because 2020 happened and we wouldn’t have survived if we had our restaurant,” Wendy says. “It worked out to our advantage.”

The rainbow flavors of South Africa

Whether as a brick-and-mortar operation or through their online catering business, Amawele’s has been met with a warm reception as the only South African restaurant in San Francisco. “People here are very open-minded to different culinary experiences,” Pam says. “It didn’t matter where our food came from–as long as it’s tasty.”

And with the myriad influences that color Amawele’s food, it’s no surprise that it was a success. Wendy and Pam’s hometown of Durban has one of the largest Indian populations in the world. In addition to the subcontinent’s flavors and techniques influence on Amawele’s menu, Wendy and Pam’s mixed Zulu, Indian, English, and Cape Malay heritage comes through in each dish. Take samp and beans, a popular Zulu dish of slowly simmered cracked hominy and beans. At Amawele’s, the twins remix this classic with their Curried Samp Hominy and Beans, adding turmeric, curry leaves, and cayenne pepper for a Durban-style twist. “We focus on the kind of food we ate growing up,” Pam says. Even savory pot pie, a traditional English dish, gets a makeover at Amawele’s with the incorporation of coconut milk, curry powder, coriander leaves, and garam masala. 

Amawele’s food is just a peek into why South Africa is called the “Rainbow Nation.” Immigration, colonization, and the introduction of new crops have all shaped the country’s cuisine. Take maize, which is native to Mexico but is used prominently in various cuisines of Eastern and Southern Africa, due to the introduction of corn to the continent via trade routes in the 1500s. “I realized how identical our grains and foods are [to other cultures],” Pam says. “I was able to find hominy, an ingredient used in Mexican cuisine, to make samp and beans.” 

As Amawele’s continues to bring the vibrant flavors of South Africa to San Francisco, Wendy and Pam are working to expand their retail footprint (their rooibos tea can be found at Roxie’s), and they’re currently developing a new peri-peri barbecue sauce. Their ultimate goal? To make the flavors of South Africa ubiquitous the world over. “We want our products to be in major retailers,” Pam says. They have recently rebranded their rooibos refreshers in hopes of gracing the shelves of Target, Whole Foods, and other stores in 2022—but it’s just the beginning. “Maybe we’ll open a restaurant like Nando’s or a healthy fast-casual chain one day.”