Deli(ciously) delectable
THE LITTLE DELI: A JOBURG LANDMARK IN LESS THAN A YEAR
‘Side-hustles’ saved the day when their catering business shut down last year.
Andrew Johnson is passionate about food and when he is not serving or chin wagging with customers at The Little Deli in Linden, he is cooking.
It is still a month before its first birthday, but the Johnson’s family shop became a Joburg 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 in situ. And it is all seriously yum.
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.
“It was very corporate, big functions, events, that type of
We waste nothing, so our range is made from everything that we have.
thing,” says Johnson, “and that evolved over time into another service, Daily Express, also very corporate orientated. It was very successful. And then lockdown came, and our business dried up.”
It was Johnson and his wife Carina’s pastime, or side-hustles as he calls it, that saved the day.
“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 into some speciality stores.”
The Little Deli became a commercial manifestation of their hobbies, a small boutique store with freshly made fare from their kitchen. Inside, there are pasta sauces, homemade pies, pestos, cold meats smoked and cured on the premises and baked goodies.
“We opened the shop in July last year, it was very little to start with,” says Johnson.
It is still small, but last year “it was a quarter of the size it is now”.
The Johnsons opened a coffee shop on site last week, too.
“We’ve grown over the last 11 months and we’re going from strength to strength. We’re very happy with this,” he says.
“Our ethos here is fairly straightforward in terms of old-fashioned thinking.
“We deal directly with farms, but only farms that use natural methods, and farmers that employ as few artificial cultivation
Andrew Johnson The Little Deli
methods as possible.
“We waste nothing, so our range is made from everything that we have.”
“We make our own stocks for the soups. We make our own sausages here. We cure meat ourselves with smoke. We do our own bacon, our own salamis, and that ethos runs through everything else as well ... no preservatives, no artificial additives.”
He says there may be some preservatives in some of the wines they use to cook with, but he laughs, “no one’s ever complained about me putting wine in something”.
The Little Deli is situated in a beautiful garden on Linden’s Fourth Avenue.
“Carina is a keen gardener, and she has really made our environment beautiful,” says Johnson, “so it made sense to open a coffee shop as the next step in our evolution.
“The menu comprises everything we make, so it is another showcase for what we do.”
After that, he says, 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.