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Pinch of Salt: Food Oscars

By Pete Goffe-Wood.

The madness of the awards season is upon us – the Veritas awards have just been doled out, and next week Platter’s announces their 5-star wines. JHP Gourmet Guide have just handed out a number of plates, Condé Nast announced their pick of the 9 best new restaurants worldwide for 2017 (including Marble in Johannesburg as the only South African pick), and Eat Out, who have already awarded their Everyday Eateries, will announce their Top 30 Restaurants in a couple of weeks.

So I’m going to jump on the bandwagon – but if you think I’m going to predict which are my top restaurants, think again – what follows are my nominations for Best Food Movie. Now there are some provisos as this is a fairly contentious movie category and I welcome debate and dissent (feel free to send in your comments). Continue reading “Pinch of Salt: Food Oscars”

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Story of a Plate: Smoked tomato risotto with mussels at Source

On the menu: Smoked tomato risotto, bacon, leek and baby marrow, steamed mussels

We loved the innovative presentation of this dish, the great tomato flavour, it’s contrasting textures, as well as perfectly cooked risotto. Tell us a bit about it?

Chef Warwick Taylor: I like runny risotto… so many people throw in cream and mascarpone cheese, which it’s not meant to have. It’s meant to be an emulsion of the fat you use, like butter, which keeps it light. It’s really more about the sauce around the rice than anything else. Then we throw in some smoked bacon, leeks, baby marrow, and baby spinach. We slow-smoke tomatoes over Rooikrans wood and then make a little tomato sauce out of that. So we have a nice smoked tomato sauce as a base, which we fold into the risotto, and off we go. For the mussels, a bit of white wine, soft herbs, a little bit of lemon in there, so they’re basically just steamed open, and then we pop them into the risotto.

It’s such an attractive plate! Is it of your own devising, or were you inspired elsewhere?

Warwick: I used to do a smoked tomato soup, and then one day I decided let’s try a risotto, and mussels always go nicely with a smoky flavour… Continue reading “Story of a Plate: Smoked tomato risotto with mussels at Source”

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Review: Marigold

A relative newcomer in Franschhoek, Marigold is part of the Leeu Collection which acquired Le Quartier Français and has replaced its erstwhile icon restaurant, The Tasting Room, with an offshoot of another Cape icon, La Colombe, in the form of La Petite Colombe.

Marigold, billing itself as “authentic Indian” is not part of the same building as Le Quartier, however, but across the main road and occupying a stand-alone building, the interior of which is rather lightly clad in Indian decor touches. On this lunch, I enjoyed the light-filled and less cluttered space, but the feeling I had was that it may not feel as cosy or plush as one would like over dinner. The lunch service was busy (considering how quiet Franschhoek can be in winter), and there were quite a few tables of international visitors, and even a large Indian family who wandered in to get take-aways… making it feel very authentic indeed. Continue reading “Review: Marigold”

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Review: Restaurant Ile Maurice

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”

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Table Manners: Competitive Eating

By Darrel Bristow-Bovey.

I was walking with my wife through the Sabine Hills in Italy and we stayed a night at an agriturismo – one of those organic farmsteads that give you a room and a bed and a meal of food grown on the farm. They’re very proud of the fact that everything is grown on the farm.

We sat down to dinner and the hostess placed a bowl of olives on the table and pitcher of water with slices of yellow lemon and a vase of flowers.

“The flowers are grown on the farm,” she said.

“Huh!” I said encouragingly, although to be honest I wasn’t that impressed by this news. Flowers have to grow somewhere. Continue reading “Table Manners: Competitive Eating”

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Story of a Plate: Tempura Linefish at Tokara

On the menu: Tempura linefish with sushi rice, avocado, sesame, wasabi mayonnaise & spiced lemon dressing

On a recent visit, we found this dish to be a real standout, both on the plate and in its precision of flavour. What was the inspiration behind it?

Chef Richard Carstens: In 1993 I was working for my mentor, Ralph van Pletzen, at a restaurant called Ralph’s in Stellenbosch, and he was the one who introduced me to a lot of aspects of Asian cuisine, like Indonesian, Chinese and Thai.

In those days not everything was readily available on the Internet, but there were these amazing magazines like Vogue Entertaining, and I was always drawn to Japanese cuisine, which was really coming to the fore in Australia. So I went to Australia around ’97-’98, and lived in Melbourne for that period, working for a chef who was into French-Japanese fusion, or Franco-Japanese cuisine. When I came back in ’98 I was working at Le Provençal restaurant in Franschhoek (now Grande Provence), and that’s where I started Franco-Japanese cuisine. There’s one dish from that era, the “Franco-Japanese interpretation” of oyster, prawn, calamari, and linefish, which I still do an evolution of every year (sometimes with up to three different versions, like when I was working in at Lynton Hall,* where we changed our degustation menu every night). Continue reading “Story of a Plate: Tempura Linefish at Tokara”

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Food festivals: the good, the bad, and the ugly

From our September 2017 newsletter:

Just as Cape Town gears up to host its very first pizza and pasta festival, it was slightly unnerving to read about a recent pizza festival in Brooklyn, New York, that left attendees feeling rightly cheated of the money they had spent on tickets (up to $69 per person), when instead of an abundance of pies (as they call them over there), they found mostly empty tents and pretty pathetic pizza offerings.

Continue reading “Food festivals: the good, the bad, and the ugly”

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Review: La Boqueria

Ironically, but quite happily so, it transpires, I managed to get to La Boqueria for lunch on the day we were planning to have dinner there, but then didn’t, because my dinner party had concerns over: a) the potential noise levels at La Boqueria (we wanted to catch up over an old-fashioned conversation); and b) reports from a few diners that the food still needed to find its footing.

Well, on both counts, we would have been better off at La Boqueria than at our second option, Café del Sol Tre. At Tre, the jammed-up tables and pumping scene were as noisy as it gets, and the food was uniformly drab and lacking in almost any flavour – the pastas were a world apart from the very good ones I’d recently tasted at Gemelli. Continue reading “Review: La Boqueria”

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Pinch of Salt: Vegetables Are The New Black

By Pete Goffe-Wood.

“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.” Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

Growing up you couldn’t get me to eat vegetables for love or money – the best I could muster was iceberg lettuce (provided it was doused in Thousand Island dressing) or potatoes, but even that was restricted to chips and roasted, mash at a push. I could eat tomatoes that were cooked in a sauce but would rather eat my own hand before a raw one passed my lips. I didn’t even try mushrooms until I was sixteen.

Why, you may ask – my answer would be that I have absolutely no idea – I just didn’t like the idea of vegetables. I was a very fussy eater as a kid and I guess my mother just indulged me. I remember one evening she was away, so my dad had taken on the cooking duties. Having no clue as to what we kids did or didn’t eat, he decided that blackmail was the best course of action and told myself and my two sisters (one of whom, to this day, is still a ridiculously fussy eater) that if we ate everything on our plates he would take us to the Drive-In. I realise that this seriously dates me and any millennials reading this will have to Google search Drive-Ins, but in our household in the 70s this was a serious treat, especially on a school night. Continue reading “Pinch of Salt: Vegetables Are The New Black”

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Story of a Plate: Trout with Guava at Hartford House

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”