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Taking sustainable seafood seriously

As is becoming ever-better known, we are decimating the wild fish in the ocean. It is now clear that many of the most popular eating fish, most notably including those sushi bar sacrificial “lambs”, salmon and tuna, have declined by 90% in the seas in the last few decades. The ocean does not factor for the market signals of supply and demand when humans send out factory-sized trawlers that harvest at a pace that will continue to collapse entire populations of fish.

The end of this chain of decimation is you and me, the consumer. We need to send the signal back up the line that we know what we are eating and that we choose not to eat fish that has been caught in an unsustainable manner and then put on a menu. (I am looking at Ile Maurice, inter alia.) We all need to install the SASSI (Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative) app on our phones or use the FishMS line (type the name of a fish and send it to 079 499 8795) to identify what is in front of us. And we need to act in supermarkets too, buying sustainable tuna for those sandwiches. Continue reading “Taking sustainable seafood seriously”

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Review: Camphors at Vergelegen

The Proposition

Blue-chip Cape estate, spectacular setting, wondrous gardens, superb wines, textbooks of history. Now that is either the most fantastic foundation for a restaurant, or a list of nerve-wracking expectations.*

The Experience

Possibly the only quibble at a recent lunch was the service which lacked the high level of attention to the floor which I’ve experienced in the past, but then again, it was a busy lunch, with many tourists in the house. As for the rest, this account could begin and end with a simple exhortation for you to visit, or revisit, soonest.

A “Summer Harvest” menu offered four courses (with three to four options to choose from for each course), and a “Tour” (degustation) menu with ten courses. Optional wine pairings are available for each. For a while now, Camphors has presented the menus with the innovation of dishes being “graded” according to their flavour and texture “weight”.  Those listed closest to the left margin are “light and delicate”, and each indent to the right describes a move towards the “full and rich”. Here’s what it looked like on a recent visit:

Continue reading “Review: Camphors at Vergelegen”

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Review: The Shortmarket Club

The Proposition

The Shortmarket Club (SC) has settled in and is now a happily reliable option for those who like more sophisticated dining experiences in the city. You can immediately see by the waistcoated staff and the service trolleys and the menu that’s laid out like an exemplar from a classic French bistro that SC aims to offer a more “adult” dining experience while most restaurants in the city take the casual contemporary road. One’s previous dining experiences (and certainly one’s age) play a part in how you’ll react to the “belle époque” ambience. I find it perfectly relaxing and I’d think that anyone who likes attractive spaces and pretty things will enjoy it – any hints of artifice are successfully trumped by the evident commitment to quality. Continue reading “Review: The Shortmarket Club”

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Story of a Plate: Salt Crust Baked Celeriac at Waterkloof

 

On the menu: Salt crust baked celeriac, curry brittle, parmesan and passion fruit

Such a beautiful plate, and surprisingly complex for a meat-less dish. How did you come up with such an unusual combination?

Chef Gregory Czarnecki: I wanted to do something with this dish that you can’t do in Europe, where if you follow the seasons, and you respect the origin of the product, celeriac is a winter or spring root vegetable, whereas in South Africa winter almost takes up half of spring (especially now!). So I wanted to showcase something that wouldn’t be possible in Europe, and that also represents this country. People often think of South Africa in terms of landscape, and culture, but it’s also about the weather: so while in the western Cape we’ll have root vegetables now, in Durban, you’ll have passion fruit in the same season, growing at exactly the same time. This just wouldn’t be possible in Europe, so I wanted to come up with something that would promote the two different regions and climates you can have here at the same time, and that would also bring together a really “old school” vegetable and an exotic fruit. Continue reading “Story of a Plate: Salt Crust Baked Celeriac at Waterkloof”

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Review: Mulberry & Prince

The Proposition

I’ve been hearing about Mulberry & Prince off and on, but was getting no real view on the type of food they cooked. Their Facebook page identifies the menu style as “New American” and I’ll save you the trouble of Googling what that means – it’s essentially anything you want it to mean. The term encompasses plates that combine ideas and/or cookery from the USA with any other global cuisine, and clearly it’s most used in the USA itself to indicate a combination of food styles, like spring rolls fused with a uniquely American ingredient, such as crab from the east coast. Continue reading “Review: Mulberry & Prince”

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Review: Klein Joostenberg Bistro

Every time I eat here again, I remind myself not to make it too long before the next visit. This casual bistro exemplifies good food at good prices. It’s not following trends, neither is it guilty of the “everything done more or less ok” approach that too many casual eateries go for.

Case in point was my lunch plate: warm pickled pork tongue with a home-made mustard, potato salad and vegetables (R90). It was just right in flavour, texture and balance and, paired with a glass of the Joostenberg Fairhead, left the distinct impression that this is the kind of food that one could eat every day – satisfying on all gustatory fronts, as well as interesting to anyone who’s looking for something a touch different. So too the crême brulée with its guava base and orange flavour – a well-known dessert with a fresh twist. Continue reading “Review: Klein Joostenberg Bistro”

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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”