WATCH: The Little Deli in Linden is fast becoming one of Joburg’s foodie hot spots

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 Johnson’s family shop has become 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 on site. And it is all seriously yummy.

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,” he said.

“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.”

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It was Andrew 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 to some speciality food 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, home made pies, pestos, cold meats smoked and cured on the premises and delicious baked goodies.

“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 last week. “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.”

The Little Deli makes everything from scratch and, says Andrew, “we waste nothing. So literally, 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. Our pastry is also made here from stone-ground flour using farm eggs, farm butter, 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 4^th Avenue.

“Carina is a keen gardener and she has really made our environment beautiful,” says Andrew, “so it just made sense to open a coffee shop as the next step in our evolution. The menu comprises everything that we make here, so it really 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.