Montagu is slightly confusing; while at first sight it appears to be a little Cape winelands dorp, if you explore a little through the streets you find that actually the higher end of town (away from the Kogmanskloof river... which floods spectacularly every few years) is filled with very larnie residences owned as holiday homes or weekend getaways by rich Capetonians. As a result, the town has a couple of decent restaurants, and we decided to visit Josephine's, a lovely little 19th century house on Bath Street, right in the middle of town.
The innovative menu includes Cape Dutch, Malay, Indian and Thai dishes: I had red Thai chickpea and banana curry, followed by tiramisu. The companion had kudu fillet in red wine sauce, with pear crumble tart and cream. A lovely fiery curry was packed with aromatic flavours, but the tiramisu was very odd and really rather nasty - consisting of layers of dry sponge cemented together with unsweetened cream cheese, dredged in cocoa. No coffee, no marsala, no fun.
The companion raved about his kudu, and it looked lovely, with a rich, wine-dark sauce and beautifully-cooked vegetables; while I sneaked a spoonful of his robust pear tart, topped with crunchy crumble. The friendly but very flustered waitress was utterly overwhelmed by four tables of customers - God only knows what would have happened if anyone else had arrived for dinner - and forgot a couple of drinks orders. She also made the mistake of switching on the overhead lights three-quarters of the way through our meal, transforming the dining room with a flick of a switch from a dusky, romantic space lit by paraffin lamps and candles into a shabby parlour illuminated by a couple of bare and glaring overhead bulbs. Not a good idea.
I'd be delighted to have a local restaurant like Josephine's in my home town, although I wonder how often the menu changes - I didn't notice any daily specials, and a limited menu could get boring quite quickly.
Josephine's
63 Bath Street
Montagu
Eastern Cape
Tel: (023) 614 3939
Saturday, 11 August 2007
Friday, 10 August 2007
Beads, Stellenbosch
The biggest disappointment in South Africa? For a long time it was a very pedestrian meal at Île Maurice in Umhlanga. But now, ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to say that we have a new winner: Beads, in the lovely university town of Stellenbosch in the Western Cape.
I was told in London about this new South African restaurant, Beads: "Fantastic" they said; "really innovative and interesting," they enthused. When we arrived in Stellenbosch our hosts blanched when we mentioned that we were visiting Beads: "But it's so expensive", they bleated. "I mean, they really are charging London prices". Initially I assumed this was the usual South African hyperbole, but with main courses at the rand equivalent of around £10+, Beads is priced within UK ranges - and is consequently very pricey by local standards.
Now, the location, in one of Stellenbosch's delightful oak-lined streets, is wonderful; and on a warm evening, with the sun setting through the trees and the cicadas beginning to chirp, there is nowhere lovelier. And the restaurant itself is beautiful: we sat outside on the stoep, listening to a party going on in the restaurant's gardens, and had a glass of wine. And another. And another. And then, just when we had almost finished the bottle, and one whole hour after ordering, our food arrived.
I had chosen kingklip; which arrived not only undercooked, but actually still freezing cold in the middle and with the unmistakeable grainy, watery flesh of something that has been zapped from frozen. I sent it back. It reappeared, the same fillet, still uncooked, still cold inside, and piled back on top of the original vegetables, which had clearly been left on top of the pass while someone threw the fish in the microwave for another five minutes, and were consequently by this stage also cold.
The manager had the honesty to admit that the kingklip was frozen, which made me feel even more resentful, since Stellenbosch is very close to the sea. Why is an apparently prestigious restaurant, only 10 miles from the nearest harbour, serving frozen fish at 120 bucks a pop?
Polite but painfully slow service; dreadful, dreadful food; a complaint that elicited neither surprise nor sympathy from the manager (let alone a refund); and an overambitious menu which, on the evidence of our visit, offers breathtakingly poor value for money.
I would rather stick pins in my legs than go back to this restaurant. I am even diffident about giving its address and telephone number in case some poor sap suffers the same sort of piss-poor meal as ours. But that's a chance I'm going to take. If you've had a good experience there, please let me know - surely by the law of averages they must occasionally produce something edible?
Beads
Cnr. Church and Ryneveld Streets
Stellenbosch
Eastern Cape
Tel.: (021) 886 8734
I was told in London about this new South African restaurant, Beads: "Fantastic" they said; "really innovative and interesting," they enthused. When we arrived in Stellenbosch our hosts blanched when we mentioned that we were visiting Beads: "But it's so expensive", they bleated. "I mean, they really are charging London prices". Initially I assumed this was the usual South African hyperbole, but with main courses at the rand equivalent of around £10+, Beads is priced within UK ranges - and is consequently very pricey by local standards.
Now, the location, in one of Stellenbosch's delightful oak-lined streets, is wonderful; and on a warm evening, with the sun setting through the trees and the cicadas beginning to chirp, there is nowhere lovelier. And the restaurant itself is beautiful: we sat outside on the stoep, listening to a party going on in the restaurant's gardens, and had a glass of wine. And another. And another. And then, just when we had almost finished the bottle, and one whole hour after ordering, our food arrived.
I had chosen kingklip; which arrived not only undercooked, but actually still freezing cold in the middle and with the unmistakeable grainy, watery flesh of something that has been zapped from frozen. I sent it back. It reappeared, the same fillet, still uncooked, still cold inside, and piled back on top of the original vegetables, which had clearly been left on top of the pass while someone threw the fish in the microwave for another five minutes, and were consequently by this stage also cold.
The manager had the honesty to admit that the kingklip was frozen, which made me feel even more resentful, since Stellenbosch is very close to the sea. Why is an apparently prestigious restaurant, only 10 miles from the nearest harbour, serving frozen fish at 120 bucks a pop?
Polite but painfully slow service; dreadful, dreadful food; a complaint that elicited neither surprise nor sympathy from the manager (let alone a refund); and an overambitious menu which, on the evidence of our visit, offers breathtakingly poor value for money.
I would rather stick pins in my legs than go back to this restaurant. I am even diffident about giving its address and telephone number in case some poor sap suffers the same sort of piss-poor meal as ours. But that's a chance I'm going to take. If you've had a good experience there, please let me know - surely by the law of averages they must occasionally produce something edible?
Beads
Cnr. Church and Ryneveld Streets
Stellenbosch
Eastern Cape
Tel.: (021) 886 8734
Fournos Bakery, Rosebank, Johannesburg
I've been going to the Fournos Bakery in Rosebank for years. It's one of my grandmother's favourite places for lunch. When we visited with her on a sunny Tuesday morning I chose poached egg and smoked salmon, which for some reason comes served on a scone (note to Fournos: please change this - it's hideously sweet; what's the matter with a bagel?). Gran wanted something eggy, and chose scrambled egg on toast. She received a huge pile of freshly-made, creamy scrambled eggs on hot toast and ate her way through the lot, smacking her lips with satisfaction.
We finished off - oh, the greed! - with three freshly-baked Danish pastries (you simply wander into the bakery shop, sidling carefully around racks and stacks of fresh buns, flapjacks and golden loaves of bread, and pick what you fancy) and three cappuccino coffees: the total bill came to R175 + tip.
The baked goods are wonderful; the Illy coffee superb, but the loveliest thing about Fournos Rosebank is the care and friendliness of the staff, delightful people, who take such effort to look after an elderly woman.
Fournos Bakery
33 Baker Square
Cnr. Baker & Cradock Ave.
Rosebank
Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 447 3392
We finished off - oh, the greed! - with three freshly-baked Danish pastries (you simply wander into the bakery shop, sidling carefully around racks and stacks of fresh buns, flapjacks and golden loaves of bread, and pick what you fancy) and three cappuccino coffees: the total bill came to R175 + tip.
The baked goods are wonderful; the Illy coffee superb, but the loveliest thing about Fournos Rosebank is the care and friendliness of the staff, delightful people, who take such effort to look after an elderly woman.
Fournos Bakery
33 Baker Square
Cnr. Baker & Cradock Ave.
Rosebank
Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 447 3392
The Singing Fig, Norwood, Johannesburg
When I first went to the Singing Fig in Norwood's main drag, the restaurant was at the height of its success. Plaudits and prizes, rave reviews in Highveld Style and the Star. A few years on, my cousin suggested that all was not well. "It's changed hands," he said. "My mother-in-law used to go there all the time, but she doesn't like the food there now."
My cousn''s mother-in-law is a Very Scary Woman, so it seemed sensible to get on her good side by visiting and reporting back.
The restaurant has certainly been refurbished (although it ain't air-conditioned yet, sadly): low and spacious, with a sort of stripped-wood, colonial vibe going on, and added life given to the room by the charming array of nudes and other pictures hanging on the wall. We were seated in one corner beneath a giant minge painting - an impressionist daub of a couple of legs topped with the biggest, blackest pubic bush - which reduced my companion to giggles within moments of sitting down. "Is it Lily Allen?", he whispered. Whispering was an unnecessary precaution, as the restaurant was empty. At 7pm. Not promising.
Companion ordered veal scallopina in a Jack Daniels jus with gorgonzola butter, followed by creme brulee with Grand Marnier and berry compote. I had five-spice root vegetables with spinach risotto cake, and fig ice-cream.
A vast portion of veal appeared - five scallopini, or about three-quarters of a pound's weight of meat. They were served on a cold potato salad, not mentioned in the dish's description in the menu, whose cold, thick mayonnaise combined with the hot cream sauce to create an unappetising lukewarm, greasy soup, and which contained an equally unadvertised blast of chili. The creme brulee was lovely, although the thick compote which accompanied it was more like jam than compote.
The vegetable platter was inventive and tasty, although the French-style cream sauce was redundant on a dish containing such strong Oriental flavours and influences. The risotto cake was perfect - I mean, absolutely perfect: creamy grains of just-cooked rice. Unfortunately the accompanying green beans were leathery and inedible. The fig ice-cream would have been far better made with dried figs or fig jam, as the use of fresh figs resulted in a watery, sweet vanilla cream containing slimy pieces of fresh fig utterly devoid of flavour.
Service was cheerful but amateurish, and a far cry from the snappy, NY-style professionalism of our first visit. The total bill, including a bottle of wine from the excellent wine list (particularly strong on dessert wines) was R567 for two + tip.
In general the restaurant has an air of distraction that bodes ill; the cooking (judging by this visit) is distinctly inconsistent; service is sloppy, and its web site (which appears to have been recently suspended for non-payment - that, at any rate, is what the Google cache suggests) is at least 8 months out of date ("Menu will be subject to change in January 2007 when we launch our new menu!!", visitors are told in August 2007). If the owners of the Singing Fig want it to continue as a respected restaurant, they need a little more concentration on the basics of the business: consistently well-chosen and competently-cooked food, served with professionalism.
A little less bush, and a little more rush.
The Singing Fig
44 The Avenue
Norwood
2192
Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 728 2434
My cousn''s mother-in-law is a Very Scary Woman, so it seemed sensible to get on her good side by visiting and reporting back.
The restaurant has certainly been refurbished (although it ain't air-conditioned yet, sadly): low and spacious, with a sort of stripped-wood, colonial vibe going on, and added life given to the room by the charming array of nudes and other pictures hanging on the wall. We were seated in one corner beneath a giant minge painting - an impressionist daub of a couple of legs topped with the biggest, blackest pubic bush - which reduced my companion to giggles within moments of sitting down. "Is it Lily Allen?", he whispered. Whispering was an unnecessary precaution, as the restaurant was empty. At 7pm. Not promising.
Companion ordered veal scallopina in a Jack Daniels jus with gorgonzola butter, followed by creme brulee with Grand Marnier and berry compote. I had five-spice root vegetables with spinach risotto cake, and fig ice-cream.
A vast portion of veal appeared - five scallopini, or about three-quarters of a pound's weight of meat. They were served on a cold potato salad, not mentioned in the dish's description in the menu, whose cold, thick mayonnaise combined with the hot cream sauce to create an unappetising lukewarm, greasy soup, and which contained an equally unadvertised blast of chili. The creme brulee was lovely, although the thick compote which accompanied it was more like jam than compote.
The vegetable platter was inventive and tasty, although the French-style cream sauce was redundant on a dish containing such strong Oriental flavours and influences. The risotto cake was perfect - I mean, absolutely perfect: creamy grains of just-cooked rice. Unfortunately the accompanying green beans were leathery and inedible. The fig ice-cream would have been far better made with dried figs or fig jam, as the use of fresh figs resulted in a watery, sweet vanilla cream containing slimy pieces of fresh fig utterly devoid of flavour.
Service was cheerful but amateurish, and a far cry from the snappy, NY-style professionalism of our first visit. The total bill, including a bottle of wine from the excellent wine list (particularly strong on dessert wines) was R567 for two + tip.
In general the restaurant has an air of distraction that bodes ill; the cooking (judging by this visit) is distinctly inconsistent; service is sloppy, and its web site (which appears to have been recently suspended for non-payment - that, at any rate, is what the Google cache suggests) is at least 8 months out of date ("Menu will be subject to change in January 2007 when we launch our new menu!!", visitors are told in August 2007). If the owners of the Singing Fig want it to continue as a respected restaurant, they need a little more concentration on the basics of the business: consistently well-chosen and competently-cooked food, served with professionalism.
A little less bush, and a little more rush.
The Singing Fig
44 The Avenue
Norwood
2192
Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 728 2434
Wednesday, 20 December 2006
1860 Indian Restaurant, Croydon, UK
What a brilliant find!
Tucked on an unprepossessing high street in Croydon, 1860 looks like a slightly sleazy cafe from the outside, and this impression isn't entirely dispersed by the low-key furnishing and sparse decoration. It's run by a husband and wife from Durban in South Africa, and serves a brilliant selection of South African Indian dishes. With their reliance on fresh flavours and aromatic, complex spices, the cuisine of South Africa's Indian population is very different from the creamy, oniony Bangladeshi food that most British "Indian" restaurants serve.
The food at 1860 is utterly wonderful. Our party ordered a selection of dishes which included bunny chow and a range of vegetarian side dishes. Bunny chow was perfect: a rich, densely-flavoured golden gravy packed with soft potatoes and chunks of chicken. Each of the other dishes had individual flavours and spicing - very different from other Indian restaurants, which often use the same sauce for everything; they ranged from the intense aniseed and fennel flavours of the lamb to the gentle, garlicky dhal.
Breads were generously sized and had the steamy golden crust of a freshly-made roti.
I cannot recommend 1860 highly enough. If you've never been to a South African Indian restaurant, don't be put off by the unfamiliar names - put yourself in the hands of the owners and trust them to make you a wonderful meal.
1860
28 South End
Croydon
Surrey
CR0 1DN
Tel. (020) 8688 3839
Tucked on an unprepossessing high street in Croydon, 1860 looks like a slightly sleazy cafe from the outside, and this impression isn't entirely dispersed by the low-key furnishing and sparse decoration. It's run by a husband and wife from Durban in South Africa, and serves a brilliant selection of South African Indian dishes. With their reliance on fresh flavours and aromatic, complex spices, the cuisine of South Africa's Indian population is very different from the creamy, oniony Bangladeshi food that most British "Indian" restaurants serve.
The food at 1860 is utterly wonderful. Our party ordered a selection of dishes which included bunny chow and a range of vegetarian side dishes. Bunny chow was perfect: a rich, densely-flavoured golden gravy packed with soft potatoes and chunks of chicken. Each of the other dishes had individual flavours and spicing - very different from other Indian restaurants, which often use the same sauce for everything; they ranged from the intense aniseed and fennel flavours of the lamb to the gentle, garlicky dhal.
Breads were generously sized and had the steamy golden crust of a freshly-made roti.
I cannot recommend 1860 highly enough. If you've never been to a South African Indian restaurant, don't be put off by the unfamiliar names - put yourself in the hands of the owners and trust them to make you a wonderful meal.
1860
28 South End
Croydon
Surrey
CR0 1DN
Tel. (020) 8688 3839
Thursday, 14 December 2006
Madiba, Brooklyn, New York
I’ve only ever been to one shebeen, when I was a teenager. It was owned by a gentle, permanently stoned poet called Zeke, and occupied one bare room of his mother’s house in a township on the South African coast. Zeke’s shebeen consisted of a fridge, several plastic patio chairs and twenty cases of Lion lager, and on more than one occasion I found my way through the township’s anonymous streets to the house by following the smell of the fragrant, blue dope smoke that escaped from its windows.
Madiba is a world away: they don’t let you smoke dope, for a start. The restaurant is on Dekalb Avenue in Brooklyn, a short subway or bus ride from Central Manhattan, and was filling up by the time we arrived, early on a drizzly Saturday night. The interior is shebeen-chic—kitchen tables and chairs, and jam-jars instead of drinking glasses—while the lighting is rather like Jade Goody—dim, starts off cute, but quickly becomes irritating. (Later we watched, trying not to snigger, as guests on a nearby table passed round a miniature keyring-torch to read the menu.)
Since all three South African beers on the wine list were out of stock, the waiter suggested that we tried Krait beer, which he described, straight-faced, as Indian beer brewed in South Africa. In fact, it is British—Krait is the export version of Cobra—and is brewed in Poland, as he could have realised if he read the label. Sadly, the spelling mistakes and grammatical errors that litter the menu suggest that the ability to read, write or use the spell-check function are not seen as a priority by Madiba’s owners (the web site boasts proudly, “Our restaurants boast a South African atmosphere and traditionally prepared specialities like none other offering The South African Experience, first of its kind, in the United StatesMadiba [sic]”, while the menu offers, among other things, mushroom saurce, baked potatoe and yello rice).
The menu covers South African cuisine from traditional Cape Dutch and Malay dishes like bobotie and pickled fish, to Indian cuisine like samosas and breyani, and includes home-style dishes from the black culinary tradition like uputhu (maize porridge) and chakalaka (a sort of spiced vegetable salad) that rarely appear on restaurant menus even in South Africa. The South African wine list offers a reasonable selection from US$28 (£15) per bottle upwards.
I chose hake and chips with calamari, while my companion had mutton curry bunny chow. The curry was drier than most Durban versions, but tasty and presented in a generous half-loaf of brown bread. The large portion of hake was perfectly cooked, with wonderful, vinegary chips wittily served in a newspaper wrap, but the calamari rings had been hastily dumped into the fryer in a single handful and had fused into an inedible accretion of over-seasoned batter the size and shape of a Scotch egg.
From a list of desserts that included koeksisters and Dom Pedro (an ice cream confection known as the alcoholic’s milkshake) we chose malva pudding and melktert. The melktert was superb: a thick, creamy filling topped with swirls of cinnamon. The malva pudding was served with a rich rum sauce, also excellent.
Our bill appeared while we were eating pudding. Irritating, and also poor business practice, since high profit margins make after-dinner coffee and drinks lucrative sale items. Not that the utterly disgusting coffee served by Madiba would encourage any customer to linger. Including a cash tip of slightly over 15%, the bill came to US$85, or about £45 for two main courses, two puddings, three bottles of beer, and one cup of coffee. After paying the bill I discovered that US$2 had been added, presumably in error, to the credit card total. Perhaps this was the percentage of its proceeds that the restaurant tells us it “is honoured… to give… back to the people of South Africa”, although if you are making a boast like that on your web site it might be more convincing if you tell your public precisely what percentage you are donating, and to whom.
Dinner at Madiba isn’t the most expensive meal you’ll ever eat in New York, but the bill was rendered bearable only by the weakness of the dollar against the pound: some months earlier, when the dollar was stronger, the same meal would have cost nearly £55. That is a lot of money to pay for street food. At Zeke’s, his mother used to make you a plate of golden uputhu and tasty tripe stew for a couple of rand. And I bet she knew how to spell sauce.
Madiba
195 Dekalb Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
11205
United States of America
Tel: (718) 855 9190
Madiba is a world away: they don’t let you smoke dope, for a start. The restaurant is on Dekalb Avenue in Brooklyn, a short subway or bus ride from Central Manhattan, and was filling up by the time we arrived, early on a drizzly Saturday night. The interior is shebeen-chic—kitchen tables and chairs, and jam-jars instead of drinking glasses—while the lighting is rather like Jade Goody—dim, starts off cute, but quickly becomes irritating. (Later we watched, trying not to snigger, as guests on a nearby table passed round a miniature keyring-torch to read the menu.)
Since all three South African beers on the wine list were out of stock, the waiter suggested that we tried Krait beer, which he described, straight-faced, as Indian beer brewed in South Africa. In fact, it is British—Krait is the export version of Cobra—and is brewed in Poland, as he could have realised if he read the label. Sadly, the spelling mistakes and grammatical errors that litter the menu suggest that the ability to read, write or use the spell-check function are not seen as a priority by Madiba’s owners (the web site boasts proudly, “Our restaurants boast a South African atmosphere and traditionally prepared specialities like none other offering The South African Experience, first of its kind, in the United StatesMadiba [sic]”, while the menu offers, among other things, mushroom saurce, baked potatoe and yello rice).
The menu covers South African cuisine from traditional Cape Dutch and Malay dishes like bobotie and pickled fish, to Indian cuisine like samosas and breyani, and includes home-style dishes from the black culinary tradition like uputhu (maize porridge) and chakalaka (a sort of spiced vegetable salad) that rarely appear on restaurant menus even in South Africa. The South African wine list offers a reasonable selection from US$28 (£15) per bottle upwards.
I chose hake and chips with calamari, while my companion had mutton curry bunny chow. The curry was drier than most Durban versions, but tasty and presented in a generous half-loaf of brown bread. The large portion of hake was perfectly cooked, with wonderful, vinegary chips wittily served in a newspaper wrap, but the calamari rings had been hastily dumped into the fryer in a single handful and had fused into an inedible accretion of over-seasoned batter the size and shape of a Scotch egg.
From a list of desserts that included koeksisters and Dom Pedro (an ice cream confection known as the alcoholic’s milkshake) we chose malva pudding and melktert. The melktert was superb: a thick, creamy filling topped with swirls of cinnamon. The malva pudding was served with a rich rum sauce, also excellent.
Our bill appeared while we were eating pudding. Irritating, and also poor business practice, since high profit margins make after-dinner coffee and drinks lucrative sale items. Not that the utterly disgusting coffee served by Madiba would encourage any customer to linger. Including a cash tip of slightly over 15%, the bill came to US$85, or about £45 for two main courses, two puddings, three bottles of beer, and one cup of coffee. After paying the bill I discovered that US$2 had been added, presumably in error, to the credit card total. Perhaps this was the percentage of its proceeds that the restaurant tells us it “is honoured… to give… back to the people of South Africa”, although if you are making a boast like that on your web site it might be more convincing if you tell your public precisely what percentage you are donating, and to whom.
Dinner at Madiba isn’t the most expensive meal you’ll ever eat in New York, but the bill was rendered bearable only by the weakness of the dollar against the pound: some months earlier, when the dollar was stronger, the same meal would have cost nearly £55. That is a lot of money to pay for street food. At Zeke’s, his mother used to make you a plate of golden uputhu and tasty tripe stew for a couple of rand. And I bet she knew how to spell sauce.
Madiba
195 Dekalb Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
11205
United States of America
Tel: (718) 855 9190
Ile Maurice, Umhlanga
There are two English brothers, living by the South African coast. The older one needs a haircut, smokes a fair bit of dope and has an Indian girlfriend. He has become progressively more liberal as he has become older, painting his home in bright colours and listening to hip-hop as he builds a new swimming pool. The younger brother is conservative, wealthy and fastidious. He dresses in Lacoste slip-slops and drives a white Jeep. He has just had an extra layer of razor-wire installed on top of the high wall that surrounds his house. He doesn’t know his maid’s surname, but he can tell you the current value of the property next door within a margin of error of plus-minus R5,000.
The first brother is Durban, the stately city that grew up on the shores of the Indian Ocean in the 1840s. The second is Umhlanga, a high-rise holiday resort a few miles north of Durban. In some ways Île Maurice spans both of them—it is a French-Mauritian restaurant that used to be located in Durban’s ‘Restaurant Mile’, Florida Road, but moved a couple of years ago to an old colonial-era house overlooking Umhlanga’s beach.
Seated on the verandah next to a party of beautiful, bored Italians who drank red wine and chatted constantly on cell phones, we were ignored by the owner? Manager? At any rate, by the middle-aged man who squeezed past our table a couple of times to relight the candle lantern behind me without an apology or acknowledgement. Even when I tried to pin him down to ask about the restaurant he shrugged off any attempt at interaction and made his escape as quickly as possible.
The waiting staff on the evening we visited was composed almost entirely of handsome, young white men whose hearts were not really in it; I cherish the memory of one surf-god who managed to carry three plates at the same time—his tongue literally sticking out with the concentrated effort of doing so.) In the tortuous social codes of apartheid-era South Africa, for expensive restaurants to employ white people as waiters or bus-boys was often one of the most effective ways to signal luxury, privilege and—in every sense—exclusivity. Twelve years after liberation, in Umhlanga at least, some things haven’t changed.
All of which I could ignore if the food had exceeded my expectations. Unfortunately it barely met them. The menu veers between French haute cuisine of the most predictable kind (Vichyssoise, soupe crabe) and local fish presented at eye-watering prices. Daube de poisson au Captain Sarno (Salvatore Sarno leads South Africa’s Americas Cup team) was a generous fillet of line fish in a watery tomato sauce which bore no evidence of the promised coconut. It came with a tiny portion of vegetables, and a vast bowl of stewed, wet brown lentils which combined with the tomato sauce to form a sort of grainy, brown soup in which chunks of line fish bobbed.
I turned down the banane au coco flambée, crêpes Suzettes and other sweet offerings that nobody in the Northern hemisphere has put on a menu for the last thirty years. My companion had crème brulée and reported that it was very eggy and barely brulée. Two main courses, a pudding, coffee and a bottle of Steenberg Reserve Sauvignon Blanc came to R440. Good value for money? Hardly.
The logo that the Mauvis family has chosen for Île Maurice is a charming device depicting a dodo. The dodo, you recall, came from Mauritius; it was luxuriantly built, slow-moving and incapable of flight or innovation. It became extinct.
There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
Île Maurice
9 McCausland Crescent
Umhlanga Rocks
KwaZulu-Natal
4320
South Africa
Telephone: (031) 561-7609
The first brother is Durban, the stately city that grew up on the shores of the Indian Ocean in the 1840s. The second is Umhlanga, a high-rise holiday resort a few miles north of Durban. In some ways Île Maurice spans both of them—it is a French-Mauritian restaurant that used to be located in Durban’s ‘Restaurant Mile’, Florida Road, but moved a couple of years ago to an old colonial-era house overlooking Umhlanga’s beach.
Seated on the verandah next to a party of beautiful, bored Italians who drank red wine and chatted constantly on cell phones, we were ignored by the owner? Manager? At any rate, by the middle-aged man who squeezed past our table a couple of times to relight the candle lantern behind me without an apology or acknowledgement. Even when I tried to pin him down to ask about the restaurant he shrugged off any attempt at interaction and made his escape as quickly as possible.
The waiting staff on the evening we visited was composed almost entirely of handsome, young white men whose hearts were not really in it; I cherish the memory of one surf-god who managed to carry three plates at the same time—his tongue literally sticking out with the concentrated effort of doing so.) In the tortuous social codes of apartheid-era South Africa, for expensive restaurants to employ white people as waiters or bus-boys was often one of the most effective ways to signal luxury, privilege and—in every sense—exclusivity. Twelve years after liberation, in Umhlanga at least, some things haven’t changed.
All of which I could ignore if the food had exceeded my expectations. Unfortunately it barely met them. The menu veers between French haute cuisine of the most predictable kind (Vichyssoise, soupe crabe) and local fish presented at eye-watering prices. Daube de poisson au Captain Sarno (Salvatore Sarno leads South Africa’s Americas Cup team) was a generous fillet of line fish in a watery tomato sauce which bore no evidence of the promised coconut. It came with a tiny portion of vegetables, and a vast bowl of stewed, wet brown lentils which combined with the tomato sauce to form a sort of grainy, brown soup in which chunks of line fish bobbed.
I turned down the banane au coco flambée, crêpes Suzettes and other sweet offerings that nobody in the Northern hemisphere has put on a menu for the last thirty years. My companion had crème brulée and reported that it was very eggy and barely brulée. Two main courses, a pudding, coffee and a bottle of Steenberg Reserve Sauvignon Blanc came to R440. Good value for money? Hardly.
The logo that the Mauvis family has chosen for Île Maurice is a charming device depicting a dodo. The dodo, you recall, came from Mauritius; it was luxuriantly built, slow-moving and incapable of flight or innovation. It became extinct.
There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
Île Maurice
9 McCausland Crescent
Umhlanga Rocks
KwaZulu-Natal
4320
South Africa
Telephone: (031) 561-7609
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