Here’s A Lovely Little Article The Telegraph Wrote About ‘Cape Cuisine’
01 Feb 2016 by Sloane Hunter in Cape Town, Food, The Entertainer, Travel
It’s quite quaint and beautifully accurate. The Telegraph’s Graham Boynton took a little trip to the peninsula to visit our fairest wine farms and cuisine spots. His introduction is a mix of knowledge and obviousness that is frequently left out of descriptions of the way Cape Town really is:
South Africa’s Western Cape is barely Africa. It is more like a mix of California and the Mediterranean than the southern end of a turbulent continent. The region is physically cut off from the Sturm und Drang of postcolonial Africa by a cordon of massive mountain ranges, a cordon sanitaire of granite, if you like. So foreign is the Cape that people who translocate here from other South African cities are said to be “semi-grating”. And these soaring mountains and dramatic sweeping valleys have bestowed upon the Cape the most striking winelands on the planet, reason alone to travel here.
Then there is the food. Over the past decade there has been a gastronomic revolution that would suggest Cape cuisine is up there with the best in the world – both the Tasting Room at Le Quartier Francais in Franschhoek and The Test Kitchen in Cape Town are included in the San Pellegrino list of the top 100 restaurants in the world, and I shall name almost a dozen more that are, in my view, their equal. As the chefs and winemakers are keen to point out, the emphasis today is on fresh herbs, fresh vegetables and wines produced with minimal interference, allowing the Cape grapes to speak for themselves.
As most Brits, he even had a laugh about the value of our rand:
What’s more, as the South African rand continues to weaken against the pound, the country becomes laughably cheap for holidaymakers. As we went to press the exchange rate was 23 rand to the pound. Five years ago it was half that, and in the late Eighties it was 3.8 rand to the pound.
So off Graham went and took a tour around the peninsula and enjoyed what most locals tend to miss out on. Here are a few of the stand out favourite lines:
Cape Town
Start at Luke Dale-Roberts’s The Test Kitchen – it’s the hot Cape Town ticket, so you will have to book well ahead.
The six-course Discovery Menu costs £22 and the eight-course Gourmand menu £50 (£68 with paired wines) – ludicrously cheap for such fine food.I wish.
A few miles from The Test Kitchen, just around Table Mountain, is Constantia – the best restaurant here is Greenhouse in the Cellars Hohenort Hotel at 43 Brommersvlei Road. Liveried waiters deliver duck and porcini pastille and slow-roasted crispy duck with honey ginger jus. It is an adventurous menu that doesn’t take itself too seriously – lobster sandwich, miso and sesame macaroons and goat’s cheese cupcakes lead you to slow-cooked Karoo lamb chops and coconut-crusted lamb heart. Tasting menus from £40.
Nothing too ludicrous about that. But then he discovers Noordhoek:
Close to Cape Town is Noordhoek, a coastal suburb some 20 miles from the city and the location of Cape Point vineyards, where Duncan Savage makes international award-winning wines. Nearby is the Foodbarn, where chef Franck Dangereux serves up a Cape version of French country cuisine as well as outstanding tapas. The view overlooking the five-mile-long Kommetjie beach alone is worth the trip.
Graham then visits Stellenbosch and Franschhoek – check out what he has to say here. But his description of The Swartland is unprecedented:
The Swartland
The hippie/surfie/wannabe astronaut winemakers – under the collective banner of Swartland Independent Producers – are regarded as the hottest new thing in the Cape. Some 35 miles north of Stellenbosch, the Swartland is raw, spectacular countryside with soaring mountains and dramatic valleys. But most of the small-production, family winemakers are somewhat reclusive and hard to find, living as they do at the end of corrugated dirt roads. Where you will find them is in the small village of Riebeek Kasteel during the annual celebration called The Swartland Revolution. Now in its sixth year, this is an enormous party in early November comprising seminars, dinners and wine tastings.
But like Graham pointed out in the beginning, there is so much more to Cape Town than meets the eye. And, while the places he listed are as legit as they come, The Entertainer app offers so much more and is the perfect way to save during our terrible slump in rand value. Until the 14 February, you can get 14% off the Cape Town version of The Entertainer when you buy it using the code 2oceansvibe.
Do it.
[source: telegraph]
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