What South Africans Are Actually Searching For: A Look at Dining Trends

Search behaviour is the most honest market research

Ask people what they like to eat and you'll get aspirational answers. Watch what they search for when they're hungry and you'll get the truth.

Search data is the most under-used form of dining market research in South Africa. It tells you, in real time, what diners are curious about, what cuisines are rising, what dishes are fading, and — crucially — what people in specific cities and suburbs are looking for that they can't easily find. Unlike surveys, search behaviour has no social-desirability bias. Nobody searches for a dish they don't actually want to eat.

This piece is a first look at the patterns surfacing across Dine South Africa's dish search — the aggregates, the surprises, and what they suggest about where the country's appetite is heading.

The relentless dominance of the burger

Some things don't change, and the burger is one of them. Across every province with meaningful coverage, the burger is the single most-searched dish — by a wide margin. It is the lingua franca of South African dining: the dish a group can always agree on, the default of the indecisive, the benchmark of a price index.

What is changing is which burgers are searched for. "Burger" is increasingly not enough. Diners search "smash burger," "double burger," "vegan burger," "beef burger" — evidence that the category is fragmenting into sub-intents. A restaurant that merely serves "a burger" is increasingly invisible to a diner whose craving has become specific.

The quiet rise of regional African cuisine

The most encouraging trend in the data is the growth of search interest in regional African cuisines — West African, Ethiopian, Cape Malay, Mozambican-Portuguese. These are cuisines that, until recently, were badly served by mainstream discovery: too specific for broad directory categories, too unfamiliar to general reviewers, and too often reduced to a generic "African" tag that buried them.

Dish-first search changes that. A diner looking for "jollof rice," "injera," "bobotie," or "prawns" no longer has to know a restaurant's name to find the cuisine — they search the dish, and the restaurants appear. The result is that cuisines which were geographically discoverable only by word-of-mouth are, for the first time, nationally searchable.

Plant-forward is growing — but not where you'd expect

The assumption that plant-based dining is a Cape Town phenomenon does not hold up. Search interest in vegetarian and vegan dishes is distributed more broadly than stereotype suggests, with meaningful volume in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal. What's shifting is the framing: diners aren't searching for "vegan restaurants" — they're searching for specific dishes ("vegetarian burger," "vegan pasta," "plant-based bowl") and filtering by dietary tag.

The implication for restaurants is significant. You do not need to be a "vegan restaurant" to capture this demand. You need to have a small number of strong, well-tagged plant-based dishes on a conventional menu. Structure and tagging do the rest.

Breakfast is the new battleground

Breakfast and brunch have moved from a weekend niche to a daily competitor category. The data shows breakfast dishes — eggs, full English, shakshuka, breakfast bowls — consistently among the most searched items, and not just on weekends. Two forces are at work: the continued growth of remote and hybrid work, which untethered the morning meal from the office; and the affordability of breakfast relative to dinner, which makes it an attractive treat in a cost-conscious economy.

For restaurants, breakfast is one of the highest-margin, lowest-barrier categories to compete in — and one of the most under-structured online. A restaurant with a well-photographed, well-priced, well-tagged breakfast menu is well-positioned to capture a search that is only growing.

What the data still can't tell us (yet)

Honesty matters in a piece like this. The trends above are early signals, not finished findings. As the dataset deepens — more restaurants, more dishes, more search volume across more provinces — the picture will sharpen. Three things will become visible that aren't yet.

• City-level divergence. Whether the same dish trends differently in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban — and what that says about each city's dining identity.
• Seasonal patterns. Which dishes rise in summer versus winter, and how that should shape menu planning.
• Price-response elasticity. Whether a category's search volume rises or falls as its average price moves — the single most useful number a restaurant can have.

What a restaurant should do with this

If you run a restaurant, the practical takeaway is to stop treating your menu as a fixed document and start treating it as a living response to what your diners are searching for. The data above is available, in some form, to every restaurant on the platform — through search, through the Price Index, and through the trending dishes surfaced on the home page.

The restaurants that will win the next cycle of dining demand are the ones that watch what their market is actually searching for, and make sure their menu answers.

— The Dine South Africa Insights Team

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Related: How Much Does Eating Out Really Cost in South Africa? · The State of Restaurant Discovery in South Africa