Lewis, DesireeBongwana, Thembelihle2025-03-032025-03-032023https://hdl.handle.net/10566/20279Within the broad body of scholarship on critical approaches to the cultural politics of eating, food tastes and food branding, an increasing amount of work is being done on the social and cultural functioning of restaurants. This study contributes to a global body of work on the semiotics, social history and politics of popular restaurant culture by exploring a steakhouse franchise that emerged in apartheid-era South Africa, but that has gone on to become a beacon of convivial South African eating among black and white South Africans from different social classes. One aim of the study, building on a provocative MA thesis at UP several years ago, is to explore how this chain of restaurants, influenced by the American steakhouse model, embeds and reproduces apartheid-era forms of identity formation in a post-apartheid South Africa. Key to this study’s preoccupations therefore are the mechanisms that reinforce relations and ideologies based on “race” in the everyday context of fast-food consumption. This is explored both in the restaurant chain’s employment patterns and in its ideas and standards for service, productivity and leadership. Also important to this study is how the Spur, as a particular kind of fast-food franchise perpetuates and draws on national and globalised myths and meanings. Attention is therefore paid to the iconography it uses in branding, its distinctive advertising images, tropes and strategies, and its evolving efforts to offer South African food consumers the promise of familial experiences of eating. Here, attention is paid to the Spur’s reliance on post-apartheid mythmaking: it is shown how the Spur’s marketing content and strategy draws on popularised ideas about South Africa as a rainbow nation. On one hand, then, the restaurant is explored as a public site of democratic South African conviviality, play, pleasure and entertainment in titillating different senses in relation to food. On the other hand, the Spur’s pleasures are shown to rest on legacies and images of racial and gendered violence, othering and an oddly “nostalgic” imagining of coloniality.enFamily restaurantPublic eatingFast-foodRainbow-nationViolenceArticle