Kwa-Zulu Natal – Rossouw's Restaurants

Established in 1976, this icon has moved a few times but has been at its current Umhlanga Rocks location since 1999. I can only imagine it stood out more proudly at that time – now the vertical growth of the neighbourhood lends the restaurant a kind of “hidden corner” feeling, while the strip spawns more and more of the usual cheerfully rowdy drinks-and-basic-grub outlets that South Africa is rapidly filled with.

I’ve eaten here a number of times over the last decade-plus, and it’s always wonderful to be able to return to a restaurant over and over and find it mostly unchanged, since in so doing they curate our memories and are polite about our mortality – for if these stay, and stay the same, so, it seems, do we… at least a part of us. Continue reading “Review: Restaurant Ile Maurice”

On the menu: Wayfarer smoked trout with guava (part of a tasting menu which changes every night)

We were intrigued by the combination of fish and guava – how did that come about?

Chef Constantijn Hahndiek: Yes, it is an unusual dish, and the reason we went for the guava is because that trout is so unique; it’s got both a strong smokey flavour, and also quite a bit of saltiness from the smoking process.

We don’t smoke it in-house, because we can’t beat the quality of Wayfarer (which is extremely well known for their way of smoking; they are artisanal smokers, with an underground tunnel that actually feeds into their smoker, and their curing process is quite special as well). So with that trout – and especially the wine we served with it [the 2010 Jacques Bruére Blanc de Blanc] – we were relying on all those other elements to make that guava work. Continue reading “Story of a Plate: Trout with Guava at Hartford House”