By Veruska de Vita

Rosettenville is like a caricature. It's like slipping into Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole only that this hole is more of a prawn and olive oil adventure than a mad hatter's tea party... with a little gambling just for good measure.

Tucked somewhere between a sublime land of illegal immigrants and the toxic beat of Hillbrow, this old area in the south of Joburg has more Alicias than Alices and a few more sardines and horses than rabbits.

"What are you writing?" says the Indian man who has run across the street to see what I'm doing.

Pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, he provides a history of the nursery school above his tyre workshop - Eagle's Ridge pre-school, aftercare and boarding school.

"It's wonderful. Every year the kids dress up and do a Christmas procession in the street. They hold candles and sing songs, it's very cute."

A white Toyota Tazz roars past, it's fitted with a bonsai exhaust that seems to crack through the sound barrier. Three burly men are packed inside, together with mounds of toilet paper.

The man on the back seat seems the worst off with toilet rolls all the way up to his neck. He even has a few tucked beneath his sweaty armpits - a mud wrestler softening the blow to toilet paper. A scene of contradictions.

What sets Rosettenville locals apart from the rest is diction. It's one that has come straight out of 1970s Portugal (whether the person is from Madeira, Mozambique or Angola), of flower power and fado music, a cadence of matter-of-fact shrugs and practical philosophy. Some of the accents come straight out of a Nandos ad.

The Four Seasons fruit shop strikes the nose with the smell of wet earth and the yeasty sweetness of baking. Lemons, the rinds gnarled and fleshy, cabbages still speckled with sand, red apples stacked in high symmetry and navel oranges sweating their scent are part of what gives this shop its particular reverence.

Fernando Pinto sits behind the counter reading O Seculo. A scene from a previous era. His family left Portugal when he was nine years old so his accent is still raw. He explains that in his shop the talk is all bread and football.

"Our regulars come here for the bread, which we bake ourselves, and the good vegetables. On Sundays they come in after church to talk about politics, both South African and Portuguese. In church they have to be quiet so when they come here they have lots to say."

His shyness giving way to a moment in the limelight, Fernando wrestles the shop's cashier, Sergio de Freitas, who has been watching from behind the oranges. He stays out of camera shot.

"I'm a good boy," says Fernando of his upkeep of the shop and customer relations. Sergio, laughing, gives him a friendly punch on the shoulder.

Across the road is a hairdresser where a woman is getting her hair braided while her boyfriend passes the time reading a newspaper. The shop-owner, dressed like an exotic bird from old Africa, comes to the front to see what's going on. I hold up my camera, she poses, smiles, hand on hip, long red fingernails glinting.

"Wait," she says, "is it a local paper?" I nod. "Then you can't take my picture, I'm wanted." She laughs, fluttering a hand in front of her face. She exits from a back door. The man with the newspaper gives me a piece of it with his email address written across it. "You can take my picture and send it to me. You won't forget."

Further down Main Street is Rio D'Ouro, a fish and meat deli-type store with an established history. A group of Mozambican women stand at a counter waving their tab books at the manager. Here, on the outskirts of a metropolis, shops still keep tabs.

The display fridges are packed with Cal Verde, fat sausages hang from hooks and on the fish side, it's like a morning at the harbour, except that here, when things get really busy, people take a number.

Twenty-three-year-old Manuel Sequeira is the owner-manager. A first-generation South African, Manuel followed in his father's footsteps and took over the Rio D'Ouro fish business. The business has been in the family for 35 years starting with his dad who bought the shop when he arrived here from Madeira.

"My dad was sixteen when he started working at a place called Rio D'Ouro, named after a river in Portugal. After three months he bought it and since then the shop has moved four times and we've incorporated a butchery and various other foodstuffs such as olive oils, wines, pastas, biscuits and a variety of products from all over the world."

Rosettenville was not always a melting pot for Portuguese-speaking immigrants. It used to be the working grounds of the uitlanders who arrived in Johannesburg in the middle of the 1800s to claim their stake in the gold rush. For the first few years of mad clamouring, digging and panning, it was mostly men around, the majority of them English-speaking, with very few women.

From the harshness of these conditions arose a desperate need for gambling. In the space of a few months, the newly born city had a theatre, three newspapers and the Johannesburg Turf Club where bets were made and money lost and won.

The farm Turffontein was first registered in 1859 by Abraham Smit. One portion was bought by Paul Andries Ras in 1886 and the Johannesburg Turf Club entered into negotiations with him shortly afterwards for the lease of just under 100 morgen (1 400 hectares) of land. On the first day, 300 people attended the most important race, called the Johannesburg Handicap.

In 1911 the race course was used as a landing strip. It was during this time that the first aeroplane flights were offered to the public by the John Weston Aviation Company of South Africa, and one of the first passengers was adventurous actress Cressie Leonard.

According to historical South African Air Force documents, she was picked up at Turffontein Race Course dressed for the part in a close-fitting jersey costume, with no scarves, so as not to get caught in the propeller.

Appropriately, Pioneer Park, the suburb adjacent to Rosettenville, is home to the Transport Museum.

The museum seems to whisper the words from the thousands of letters transported by the two- and four-seater Cape carts and the mourning that once surrounded the animal-drawn hearse from Tarkastad.

Today, transport logistics work around trucks carrying containers of foodstuff from international borders.

Compared with the Anglo-Boer influences of the past, life in the area these days is a little different.

"We still have the old Portuguese ladies walking to the shop every day to buy things. They still haven't learned to drive a car or speak English, so here, they catch up on gossip. It's their home away from home," says Manuel.

The gambling fever of the gold rush has been replaced by food, the present-day big deal. Churrasqueira and Café Del Sport on Main Street are well established as good eateries. Serving Portuguese cuisine, Churrasqueira translates to "a variety of dishes that have been prepared on the grill". Here bookings are essential, especially at the weekends when Victor Da Silva, his wife Jackie and her sister Claudia cater for the regulars.

It's another gem down the rabbit hole of Rosettenville. Vic has been part of the restaurant for 10 years and over time he has added a sports bar and a takeaway section. The place is ripe with occasional celebrations. For the opening of the sports bar, Vic and his team had a whole section of the road closed off and a fashion show lit up the night. In keeping with the history of racing, a BMW run was organised, with 80 cars taking part.

"It was fantastic," says Vic, "the whole community was involved."

BBC Food's Ainsley also filmed one of his episodes there. With the help of Vic and the kitchen staff they prepared Francesinha, a Portuguese dagwood traditionally made up in the north. For the Soccer World cup, on the night Portugal won, people were running into the streets with the Portuguese flag, stopping motorists and getting them to kiss it.

The whole place erupted. "I don't think many people slept that night from all the excitement," says Vic.

Along the walls of the Sports Café are pictures of the owners and their friends. From the balcony the Jo'burg skyline reminds me that we're still in Africa with the rest of the city in easy access, one of the main reasons that the suburb has become an attractive residential area for people of Soweto, adding to the ethnic melange that characterises Rosettenville.

Downstairs, Vic and his team start preparing for a Salsa evening they'll probably host when the weather warms up. I wonder if Alice is invited?