How Jo’burg Based The Little Deli Became One Of The Food Hot Spots Under Lockdown
How Jo’burg Based The Little Deli Became One Of The Food Hot Spots Under Lockdown. It is still a month before its first birthday, but Johnson’s family shop has become a Jo’burg landmark in record time. Here, everything is prepared fresh daily, using only locally sourced ingredients direct from farmers. Whether it is a pork pie, a quiche, artisanal bread, ham, salami or pastrami it is all made on site.
The Little Deli was born out of necessity when lockdown hit the Johnson’s family business hard. “We’ve been in business since 2000 and we’ve always been involved in food. We started off here with Johnson’s Catering,” Andrew Johnson told The Citizen. “It was very corporate, big functions, events that type of thing which evolved over time into another service, Daily Express, also very corporate orientated. It was very successful. And then lockdown came, so our business dried up.”
“My wife was doing a lot of French patisserie experiments and I got involved in butchery, basically in curing meats. To us it was a hobby at first and then slowly we started distributing to some speciality food stores.” Johnson added. “We opened the shop in July last year, it was very little to start with,” says Andrew. It is still small, but last year he says, “it was a quarter of the size it is now.”
The Johnsons also opened a coffee shop on site. “We’ve just grown over the last 11 months and we’re going from strength to strength. We’re very happy with this,” he says with a huge smile. “Our ethos here is fairly straightforward in terms of old-fashioned thinking,” adds Andrew. “We deal directly with farms, but only farms that use natural methods and farmers who employ as few artificial cultivation methods as possible.” After that, he told The Citizen that, plans are afoot to start a grab-and-go takeaway service and casual meals, again based on ingredients and goodies produced at The Little Deli.
