Something’s up down in Sandton
Pop star and food influencer J’something is taking nightlife in Joburg to a new level – or three – with a venture called Artistry
When you grow up around a small town restaurant, you know about customer psychology. Ask J’something, whose career is devoted to serving a large number of customers happily and often — whether the product is a sugary hook with his band Mi Casa, a steak at his Artistry restaurant or a reel on his Instagram feed.
Born Joao Carlos Lisa Botelho da Fonseca in Portugal 33 years ago, J’something came to South Africa at the age of seven with his family. Let’s just call him J.
The Fonsecas landed in the Eastern Cape resort town of Port Alfred, where his dad worked for Sun International and his mother Maria opened a restaurant called Butler’s.
“She had a chalkboard menu,” says J. “She’d write a new menu every day. Like, ‘This is what I have today!’
“You had the fishermen in the harbour, the surrounding farms and butchers, so you were able to really tap into community. She did the classics. A good oxtail, sole, ribs. Bistro style, with a Portuguese touch.”
“I learnt from her you serve people humbly because they’re in your house, because they’re at your table.
“But she also taught me to be, like, ‘This is your house, so you don’t need to take shit from people.’ Like, ‘Man, if you don’t like it, I’m really sorry that you don’t like it. We like it. And if you don’t like it, there’s many other places that you can go to. But if you do like it, I’m so glad.’”
J has poured that sauce of oldschool hospitality into his new venture, a three-storey food and entertainment venue in Sandton called Artistry. J’s restaurant is on the third floor, with a rooftop-garden bar.
One floor down is a 100-seat theatre, while a “listening bar” anchors the first floor. Patrons can also stay the night — or the month. Artistry adjoins the Blackbrick Hotel, part of the Blackbrick group, which has backed the project.
Artistry’s website describes it as “the perfect trilogy operating in one ecosystem and igniting all the senses”, which might be somewhat overstating its mystical potential.
But, for a city and a neighbourhood that sorely lack creative spaces on an intimate scale, it’s a shot in the arm.
“The ‘why’ behind Artistry was more to be a platform to share, to celebrate, and to showcase art,” says J.
He’s a marketing graduate and a deft partner with big companies — J the foetus probably arranged for his own birth to be a pop-up collab with Huggies. (J’s next cookbook is sponsored by the liqueur Amarula and co-created with fellow celeb chef The Lazy Makoti. So, his natural habitat is the clean streets of Sandton.
“I come to Sandton and I feel like there’s an element of premium,” he says. “Of ambition. Like, man, I’m somewhere important now, where important people are!
“And then you come to Artistry and feel at home. I feel like I can take my shoes off and lie back and have a nice little scrambled egg.”
The menu is dominated by classics and comfort meals. Says J: “It’s so easy to be caught up in trying to be revolutionary, which is sometimes unnecessary. Because you don’t need to do anything to a Benedict, man. Just let the Benedict be the Benedict.
“You don’t need to do anything to a good curry and rice. Just make it flavourful. And steak and potatoes, just a great quality piece of meat, a lekker sauce. Cut the chips yourself, double fry them and make your own chip spice.”
Last week he created a menu to pair with Singleton whisky at an event co-hosted with the Mail & Guardian. But he doesn’t theorise about why flavours work together.
“It’s like an outfit or eating a breakfast at night — it just needs to make sense. It’s a personal thing.
“But we understood Singleton as a whisky that wants to be enjoyed by ordinary people in ordinary moments, with no rules. So I played around with the smokiness of the whisky and other smoky flavours — barbecue flavours.
“My philosophy with food is that I’m not a chef — I’ve never professed to be a chef. I’ve got a lot of respect for chefs but, for me, it’s always been about having respect for food and respect for people’s time.”
He doesn’t have time to waste. Along with gigging and Artistry, he has two kids with his wife Cordelia
Fonseca, a kitchen influencer in her own right (@Cocodafonseca).
The couple cook together on her Instagram feed, bantering over the blender. Their foodie life began a decade back, as a distraction from the stress of his sudden musical fame.
“I said I need to find a day every week to come home and do nothing. So we started buying cookbooks and bottles of wine and getting together once a week. It was the era of hashtags. Ours was #somethingscooking. So we started to post.”
People liked the posts. Lots of people. Cue a TV show, a cookbook, a restaurant called Something’s Cooking — and now another restaurant.
Many of the Artistry kitchen staff were hired via Instagram — digital natives who dream about dishes.
And J helps out in the kitchen when needed. “I’m a worker, not a poster boy,” he says. “When I’m here, I work, because I saw my mother take the plates and get into the scullery. If you need to clean the floor, clean the floor.”