Where to eat in Nahoon
Fish and chips on Old Transkei Road, a café inside a nature reserve, and breakfast at the entrance to the beach — the Nahoon eating map.
Nahoon splits neatly into three eating situations: the beach, the reserve, and the mall. Which one you want depends less on appetite than on what you are doing that day.
At the beach
The Beach Break Café sits at the bottom of Beach Road, right at the entrance to Nahoon Beach, on 078 171 2579. It is a restaurant and coffee shop, and its position is the whole point — you can eat, walk down onto the sand, and come back for another coffee without moving your car.
This is the after-surf spot, the post-walk spot, and on a good winter morning the best place in the suburb to sit with a newspaper.
In the nature reserve
The Reef Café is in the old Footprints building at Nahoon Point Nature Reserve, on 083 419 3056, open daily from 8:30am to 4pm.
The building is worth knowing about for its own sake — Nahoon Point is where the fossilised hominid footprints were found, and the reserve has boardwalks out over the dune forest. A café inside a reserve with those daily hours is a genuinely unusual thing to have twenty minutes from town.
Note the 4pm close. This is a daytime place, not a dinner one.
Fish and chips
Nahoon Fisheries at 93 Old Transkei Road, on 043 735 4114.
Old Transkei Road is the working spine of the suburb rather than the scenic bit, and a fish and chips shop on it is exactly the sort of business that survives on regulars rather than passing trade. Take it down to the beach rather than eating in the car.
At Hemingways
Sanook Asian Kitchen is in Hemingways Mall on Western Avenue, on 043 726 8800 — Thai and Asian fusion, known for pad thai and green curry.
Hemingways is technically in Nahoon and is the suburb's wet-weather answer to everything: over 150 stores, parking under cover, and the food on the mall side rather than the beach side. If the southwester is up, this is where Nahoon eats.
Race days change everything
Oxford Striders Running Club is based on Beach Road, Nahoon, on 083 978 8817, and organises the Astron Energy Sole Destroyer among other races.
This matters for eating rather than running: on race mornings Beach Road fills with several hundred people and their cars, the Beach Break gets a rush at exactly the hour you wanted breakfast, and parking near the beach entrance disappears. Check what is on this weekend before you drive down — the 21km, 10km and 5km all start and finish in the area, and the difference between arriving at 7am on a race Sunday and any other Sunday is considerable.
The upside is atmosphere. If you like a bit of noise with your coffee, a race morning at the beach end is the best people-watching in the suburb.
What else is down there
Nahoon is not only food. Swim Smartt at 38 Smartt Road teaches swimming from age three through to adults on 083 779 5175 — worth knowing if you are making a morning of it with children and want something before lunch.
For the car rather than the family, Nahoon Auto Workshop is on Nahoon Valley Road, 043 735 2211, an independent mechanic taking all makes.
How to plan it
The beach places run on daylight and weather. The Reef Café closes at 4pm, and The Beach Break follows the beach crowd. If you want dinner in Nahoon, Hemingways is the reliable option; if you want the coast, go earlier than you think and check the wind.
Parking at the Beach Road end fills quickly on a warm Saturday. Sunday mornings are calmer.
More restaurants and cafés across Buffalo City, or see what is on this weekend.