Urban Playground: the venue sucks, the food rocks.
28 May 2025 URBAN PLAYGROUND Corner of Coronation Road & Van Wyk Street, Maitland, Cape Town. I’ve never seen a greater disconnect than that between Urban Playground’s website blurb and menu, and the restaurant itself. It’s like a boxcar racer with a V8 engine. Let me explain. The website has a rather marvellous, if slightly over developed sense of self; the mission statement and the menu items, both in type and price, suggest a sophisticated upmarket eatery, albeit in the industrial wastelands of Maitland. When you step inside the restaurant, palpably previously part of the parking lot covered to make a dining space, it might just as well be a beer and pizza joint that time forgot, with distressed bench table seating and dismal decoration. Low budget would be a misnomer as it would suggest the existence of an interior design budget. Yes, it that’s bad. The website is damn good, though. R...
