Best Restaurants in Durban
Five essential tables, ranked by occasion.
$ Under R100$$ R100–300$$$ R300–600
Additional Restaurants
Durban’s Top 5
Thava Indian Restaurant
Thava has collected four consecutive American Express Platinum Fine Dining Awards, which makes it the most decorated Indian kitchen in a city that takes Indian cooking more seriously than anywhere else in Africa. The menu goes past the Durban canon of bunny chow and biryani into the full regional range, cooked with KwaZulu-Natal seafood and locally grown spice, and the wine list treats Chenin Blanc as the serious answer to heat that it is.
Palki Restaurant
Palki has been the special-occasion address for Durban’s Indian community since 1997. It is one of very few rooms in the city that cooks both traditions with equal conviction: tandoor roasts and slow northern gravies on one side of the menu, idli, sambar and paper-thin dosai on the other. Nearly thirty years of consistency is its own argument.
Cargo Hold
Cargo Hold is the most theatrical dinner in Durban: a room set in the stern of uShaka Marine World’s Phantom Ship on the Point Waterfront, where ragged-tooth sharks cruise past floor-to-ceiling glass. The kitchen holds its end up with freshly shucked oysters, honey-ginger prawns and grilled crayfish. Dinner runs Monday to Saturday, and the tank-side tables are claimed weeks out.
Mali’s Indian Restaurant
Mali’s, on Smiso Nkwanya Road in Morningside, is where Durban goes for the South Indian plates most of the city’s kitchens skip: fermented-batter dosai, idli with proper sambar, and vegetarian cooking treated as a discipline rather than an afterthought. It is the strongest solo-dining table on this list.
Bombay Blu
Bombay Blu brings Florida Road energy to North Indian cooking: Mughlai gravies, tandoor breads baked to order rather than reheated, and a cocktail list built for the Morningside evening crowd. The plating is as considered as the cooking, which is why the city’s younger diners have adopted it as their own.
Dining in Durban
Durban holds the largest Indian-origin population of any city outside India, and the restaurants are the proof. A century and a half of Tamil, Hindi and Gujarati kitchens produced a local cuisine that exists nowhere else: Durban curry, hotter and more direct than its Cape Malay cousin, and bunny chow, the hollowed-out loaf filled with curry that the city invented and the rest of South Africa borrowed. The serious Indian rooms on this list are not a category of Durban dining; they are its centre.
The Curry Belt
Morningside, Berea and Overport hold most of the city’s best Indian tables. Florida Road is the dining strip proper, with Bombay Blu its most accomplished Indian kitchen, while Mali’s sits a few blocks off the strip on Smiso Nkwanya Road and Palki has anchored the Berea side since 1997. Booking is sensible from Thursday to Saturday; midweek these rooms take walk-ins.
The Beachfront and the North
The Point Waterfront answers a different question. Cargo Hold, inside uShaka Marine World’s Phantom Ship, is the city’s occasion restaurant, and its glass-side tables are the hardest seats in Durban to claim. Up the coast in Glenashley, Indian Summer has fed Durban North since 2010 with masala dosa and an ocean view at neighbourhood prices.
Practical Notes
Tip 10 to 15 percent; cards are accepted everywhere on this list. Durban eats early by South African standards, with kitchens busiest from 18:00 and many closing orders by 21:00. Cargo Hold serves dinner Monday to Saturday only. Summer humidity is real from December to February, so book inside rooms with air conditioning or eat after dark.