The Saxon

Lunch today, and as M says, it’s great to have places that have the feel of the special occasion. Saxon is very elite, one of South Africa’s premier hotels, and a mod-Afro dream of a palace on grounds that can only be described as royal. Getting a seat here if you are not a guest or part of the club takes some persistence. I don’t think it’s snobbery, but a certain inability to fit the casual visitor into their system. A previous attempt on my part to have lunch got nowhere even after three calls, the first call going to a machine, the second and third to a receptionist who lost me on the way to the restaurant phone. Not what you’d expect from digs like this.

Thanks to M, who made the reservation, today was easier, yet still not seamless. Three checkpoints later I was in the lounge, certainly not feeling naturally welcome. This is a quibble I have about most hotel restaurants, they don’t manage to interface with the outsider very well.

The dining room is grand in a OTT Afro way, dominated by a Greater Zimbabwe sized pot with withered tree limbs. Double volume, the space is still a little pemumbral, the big shuttered windows not letting too much of the sunshine in. You sit at bare wood tables, no linen here. Service is good but not superb, functional but  without a natural ease and familiarity with the “haute” table. Another of my bugbears – that visitors will accept this as being excusably “African” but will never therefore measure us against the world’s best.

Looking at the dinner menu with a 6 course tasting option you can see that the kitchen means business, and lunch was good. It’s eclectic food: snail tortellini; asparagus soup laced with truffle oil (and a poached chicken egg!); confit chicken (not duck) on a flat tomato pastry tart; ostrich with “chakalaka” polenta. The panna cotta was deemed very good, a sign of a confident touch. So it is fusion but more about African influence than Asian, which is refreshing. I guess that’s the closest I can get to a philosophy, modern African, but I get the feeling it still needs to settle, the chef in full play mode. Plus he makes a point of saying that changes are frequent (one of the necessities of catering for the eat-in hotel guest) so I imagine signatures have not really emerged. Next time I’d like to try dinner.

Oh yes, a surprisingly well-priced wine list.

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