Now housed in the ex-Nova, ex-Relish building, the famed Ginja occupies all three floors. Ground level is the cosiest and the most ornate, a room with patterned white walls and modern touches. The next mezzanine level’s a bar with a balcony that suggests the first mountain views, but it is on the third where Table Mountain fills the window as if you are sitting in an Imax theatre. Dining tables are also set here, the room more casual and airy than the ground floor.
Service was good, knowledgeable and efficient (until the runners arrived with the plates and began to auction them to our table: “who’s having the…”). Winelist is dominated by a handful of producers but there is a feeling of individuality to it since these aren’t the corporates.
Then there’s the Ginja (and Myoga) menu. It blinds you with science, to misquote Mr Dolby. It resembles a periodic table of the plate ahead, listing every ingredient and sauce and element with no adjective or conjunction. A shopping list of flavours, for you to try to form into a dish in your head, and again to recall when the inevitably different plate actually arrives. Creativity is rife, and I found myself wishing there was more space and opportunity to think about the suggestive words and its relation to the final food. But the beat goes on, the spaces are hard, the upstairs buzz much more cafe-like than the more contemplative lower room.
At the same time, the food could capture all your attention; but the only course where the sense of adventure of the menu was exceeded by the plate was my dessert – a great espresso panna cotta with assortments like tobacco nougat. Don’t get me wrong, the other plates were full of flavour and technically well prepared, but with little light and shade, actually forceful with dominant single flavours, like the vinegar of my savoy cabbage; while on the other hand the filled pastas had little of the promised lobster to match the rabbit.
Ginja is highly entertaining food. At the same time, plates like this demand a constant level of technical excellence and the wow of your food’s arrival needs to exceed the mystery of all those unpunctuated flavours of the menu. This night it didn’t.
70 New Church Str (entrance at the top of Buitengracht). 021 426 2368. Dinner nightly
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9 Comments
Thanks JP… and an indication of cost?
Yes, indeed, that is an omission: the menu is divided into tiers for two or three courses and there are many supplemental costs to some. Two courses with one (moderately priced) bottle of wine and pre-drinks came to R400 incl tip per person at a table of three.
How ever did Ginja get two stars in the 2009 Guide? I had lunch there today and it was dismal.
It was a set lunch, for the Press Club to meet the British High Commissioner. (She was lucky – she didn’t stay for the lunch.)
This was a two-course set lunch. There was no menu on the table, and the waiter didn’t know much about what was in the food, so I’m not sure what it was I ate, or mostly didn’t eat. The waiter took orders for the main course in a style reminiscent of an airline ad (Fish or chicken? Chicken or fish?), and I see what JPR means about the plate auction (‘Who’s having the…?’). I asked whether either of the dishes contained coriander (the bane of my life in Asian-type restaurants) but the waiter had no idea. The starter was three little cylinders of what appeared to be mashed potato, and a little heap of chopped up tomato, onion and so on, sort of gazpacho flavoured, splashed with an orange coloured sauce and served on an absurdly long plate. I had the fish main course. I’m not sure what sort of fish it was – I think the waiter said ‘santo’. It was rather tasteless and dry, served on a heap of orange coloured mush – rice, I think, soaked in what may have been the same sauce they used on the starter, and pretty much tasteless. No salad, no veg, nothing green in the whole meal. The chicken looked more interesting, but one of the diners who chose it said it was prettier than it tasted. It was served in tiny portions. The diners were mostly men and a lot of them quite big men. If they chose the chicken they must have gone home hungry.
And of course there was no chance of filling up on bread. We were allowed one slice before the starter was served, and the waiter took the tray away. This is my constant gripe about South African restaurants – will they ever learn to treat bread the way the French do – as an integral component of the meal, as necessary to the table as the knives and forks?
The coffee was served accompanied by a dish with three sections containing some triangular chocolates, some naked looking Turkish delight (it needed a dusting of icing sugar), and some biscotti. The biscotti was tough (stale?) and tasteless.
There were only 37 diners (maybe fewer – that was the number of bookings, but there were some empty places) but the kitchen was unable to get the food to the tables anything near simultaneously – our table waited a long time for our main course and our coffee while other tables were finishing theirs. The only thing the waiters were good at was topping up the wine glasses – perhaps in the hope of distracting from the meagreness of the dishes and the tardiness of the kitchen. The wines were Nederburg FIFA 2010 Sauvignon Blanc and Cab Sav – okay, but nothing special.
The cost of this lunch was only R140 per person (at least, that’s what I paid – maybe the Press Club subsidised the cost), but I felt ripped off .
I used to enjoy Ginja’s but never went again after I booked a particular table 6 weeks in advance for my wife’s birthday and when we arrived we had been pushed under the stairs so some other (same sized party) had the table we had booked. I made very loud noises to the manager (?) and was told “If I didn’t like to go elsewhere!) never been back. Strangely enough on that occassion we went to Relish (where Ginja’s is now) and continued using that. I certainly would never go back to Ginja’s!!!
I emailed my complaint about Ginja to the Press Club secretary and suggested they find a better venue, but she didn’t answer, and I see the Club is continuing to use this restaurant.
Ginja closed down on the 30th June
Saw that lights were out yesterday when driving past. Must be the spot as others have failed there. Or was it because Mike basset seems to be mainly at Myoga?
It is sad that the “institution” of Ginja has closed, it used to be so fantastic and an industry bench mark year after year. But since Jaco de Jager took over it went downhill quickly. Service standards and especially the quality and style of food just shifted after he took over. I feel terrible about the staff that worked there many years to be left without pay in winter.
The industry should make an effort to employ their staff before looking elsewhere, even if it’s on a short-term contract. This goes out to hotels in particular, since we’re always complaining that there is a lack of qualified chefs and waiters out there.