Gatsby
● South AfricaThe Gatsby was born in 1976 in the Cape Town suburb of Athlone, in a fish-and-chip shop run by Rashaad Pandy. The story, by his own account, is straightforward: a group of dockworkers came in late one Friday hungry and broke. Pandy assembled what he had, a long Portuguese-style roll, leftover Russian sausages, hot chips, achaar, and piri-piri sauce, sliced it into shareable portions, and charged them next to nothing. One of the workers said it tasted "like a Gatsby smash," referencing the Robert Redford film The Great Gatsby that had just been released. The name stuck. Pandy began making them regularly, the dish spread through the Cape Flats townships, and within a decade the Gatsby was the defining sandwich of the Coloured community in Cape Town. Today every takeaway in the Cape Flats has its own Gatsby, sliced into four or six pieces and shared by the table.
The Gatsby is communal food. You do not order a Gatsby for one person; you order one to share among friends, family, or coworkers. A full Gatsby is roughly a foot long, sliced into quarters, and meant to feed three or four people. It is the staple of weekend braai gatherings, Friday afternoon takeaways, and student late nights in Cape Town. Each shop has its preferred fillings, masala steak is the most popular, followed by polony, calamari, fried fish, and chicken, but every Gatsby includes hot chips inside the sandwich. The combination of soft bread, crispy chips, hot meat, and fierce piri-piri is unmistakably Cape Town, equally beloved across class and racial lines in a city where food has often been one of the few honest unifiers.
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Ingredients
- 1 long Portuguese roll or French loaf, about 30cm
- Marinated steak (masala-spiced) or fried polony
- A heap of hot fresh-cut chips
- Sliced tomato and shredded lettuce
- Achaar (Cape Malay pickle)
- Piri-piri or peri-peri sauce
- Mayonnaise
Method
- Slice the roll lengthwise, leaving a hinge, and spread mayonnaise inside
- Sear the masala steak in a hot pan until just cooked, then slice into strips
- Layer steak along the bottom of the roll, then pile in the hot chips
- Top with achaar, sliced tomato, shredded lettuce, and a heavy slick of piri-piri
- Press the sandwich closed and slice across into four equal portions to share