Spicy Berne BBQ Chicken (Recipe).

So I’m not really big on posting recipes. Why? Well, let’s be honest, there’s a ton of recipes out there already and I’m not exactly Marco Pierre White, even though I’m dying to read his autobiography. I just like to cook shit. Though I can’t even follow recipes myself, seriously. There are really two types of cooks: those that can cook ‘winging it,’ knowing how flavours work together and just trying things as they go along; and those that follow recipes. I’m definitely not the latter. I’m the guy with the blank look on his face staring at shelves in the supermarket, working out dishes in my head. I spend 20-minutes staring at the vegetable aisle figuring out what I’m going to cook. Actually, I spend 10-minutes in the meat aisle first, then once I’ve picked my meat I head to the veggie aisle for that decision process. The only thing that takes longer is picking a DVD on Sunday evening.

Anyways,  Sunday was a beautiful summer-like day, the Dad was in town and my sister texted me to see what we should make for lunch. I suddenly found myself sending the message back, “Braaied chicken marinated in Berne, chilli, ginger, garlic and tons of honey. Sides etc.” Maybe it was because I hadn’t had a beer in ages. Like two full days. Or whatever, I just felt like making that. And drinking Berne. There’s something satisfying about drinking and eating something made with the same beverage. As an amateur cook, the second best thing about having a professional cook sister is that she has everything in her kitchen (Obviously the best thing is when she cooks herself). She simply replied: “Just bring the beer.”

And so it happened. Chicken in Berne. With loads of garlic, chilli, ginger, harissa paste and other stuff thrown in too. What paste, huh? Harissa, there you go. It’s really freaking easy, so easy I figured I could post the recipe and even people from both camps (the recipe followers and the ‘winging it’ folk) could try it. It worked really well, the spices and beer flavours merging into one unified smack of deliciousness. Even more so when served alongside some grated fennel salad with vinaigrette and some baby potatoes drenched in olive oil, parsley and coriander.

Sunday lunch. With the family. And beer. And some good Silverthorn bubbly to kick things off. Winning, it’s really not hard.

Do try this at home, kids. You’ll need…
1 Elgin Free-Range chicken, spatchcocked (can someone Google that to find out where the hell that word came from?)
1 Brewers & Union Berne Amber Lager
Tbsp garlic
Tbsp ginger
Tbsp green chilli
3 Tbsp harissa paste
5 Tbsp honey
tsp paprika
tsp cumin
salt & pepper
1/2 handful fresh coriander, finely chopped
1/2 handful fresh parsley, finely chopped
1 lime & 1 lemon

Okay, it simple from here. Firstly, light your fire, ideally wood with some charcoal added.
While that’s burning down, make a mix from the garlic, ginger, chilli along with a good dose of salt and pepper in a bowl.
Cut your chicken in half, breasts joined in the middle, and press flat. Salt and pepper both sides all over, then take the above mix and spread it under the skin that covers the breasts & legs, saving a little bit of mix.
Put the chicken in a dish, breast-side up, and empty the Berne all over it. Then sprinkle the remaining garlic-etc mix over the top along with 1/2 the harissa paste, paprika and cumin. Let this sit for at least an hour or so. The longer the better.
Once the fire’s ready, separate the coals and add the chicken so it’s not on direct heat, then if it’s a Weber, put the lid on to smoke it nicely. Turn it a few times over 30 minutes, basting with the beer.
Leave the chicken to cook, head to the kitchen and reduce the beer mixture in a pan until it’s about 1/4 it’s original volume. Once it’s there, add the honey and remaining harissa paste and cook a few minutes longer then remove. Take this outside and baste the chicken a few times, turning, until it’s ready (i.e. nicely browned, cooked through).
Remove chicken and cut on a board into pieces. Pour reduced beer sauce over the top, squeeze lemon & lime and then sprinkle with coriander & parsley and serve, with some more Berne.*

There it is. Less yada yada. More happy eating.

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* And if you didn’t finish two Berne’s yourself during the cooking process you’ve failed miserably!

My Black Book.

I get asked the ‘where to go for what’ question a helluva lot. Regular text messages like: “Restaurant recommendation please, bud. First date, somewhere cosy. Oh, drinks after? Thanks.” Phone calls where I end up discussing the merits of how important atmosphere is versus food. Emails from people saying they’re going to Paris and want to know where to eat. It’s cool to help out, and people generally seem happy with my suggestions.

Anyways, these days, you don’t need a black book, you just need a smartphone and The Google Machine. But I thought it’d be fun to throw down four or five spots I recommend a lot and for what. I ended up throwing down a few more. So here they are, 40 rather useful places to know about. Yes, there’s a lot that would overlap and plenty more to add, but this is just how I first thought of them…

1. First morning coffee: Deluxe Coffeeworks
2. Coffee & croissant: Jason (ex-Jardine Bakery)
3. Hangover breakfast: Sidewalk Cafe
4. Classy breakfast: Table Thirteen
5. Brunch: Bistro 1682
6. Saturday morning beer: Neighbourgoods Market
7. Healthy lunch: Cookshop
8. Lunch and the paper: Mozzarella Bar
9. Quick sandwich: Jason (ex-Jardine Bakery)
10. Unfussy lunch with a mate: Mano’s
11. Classy lunch with a mate: Dear Me
12. Power lunch: Caveau
13. Long boozy lunch: The Foodbarn
14. Very low-key lunch: Dias Tavern
15. Hipster lunch: Superette*
16. Sunday lunch: Woodlands Eatery
17. Winelands lunch: Bar Bar Black Sheep
18. Early afternoon espresso: The Power & The Glory
19. Drinks by the pool: Sandy B’s
20. Early afternoon beer: &UNION
21. Vegetarian meal: Masala Dosa
22. Second best vegetarian: Lola’s
23. After work drinks: &UNION
24. Martini’s: Planet Bar
25. Rooftop bar: The Grand Daddy
26. Dinner with a mate: Hudsons
27. Dinner with the family: Massimo’s
28. Dinner with a view: The Roundhouse
29. Romantic dinner: Kitima
30. Tapas dinner: La Boheme
31. Business dinner: Bizerca
32. Gourmet experience dinner: Test Kitchen
33. Low-key dinner: Nonna Lina
34. Zen dinner: Kyoto Garden Sushi
35. Tequila-fueled dinner: El Burro
36. Classy nightcap: Fatback Soul
37. Messy nightcap: Black Ram
38. 4am on brandy: The Shack
39. 4am on cocktails: Julep
40. 5am toasted chicken mayo: Restaurant L’Orange aka Engen

Feel free to add your own suggestions as comments…

* okay, so there’s more to the Superette crowd than hipsters

Massimo’s Pizza 2.0.

Forget the overhyped reopening in the new premises that never happened, Massimo‘s pizza joint is back. Open in their old premises, which are more than adequate, I went for a meal on Friday and can only tell you that the expectations of greatness were more than satisfied.

The restaurant is in that small centre with the Spar in it as you come down from Constantia Neck into Hout Bay, in a neat space with a playground for kids and a few tables outside. Nothing fancy, but aesthetically friendly. Massimo and his wife Tracy are also the most genuinely hospitable hosts, there every day to oversee things, Massimo making the pizzas himself. They have a decent wine list and plenty of local microbrews on offer.

But let’s focus on the food. I don’t think it’s fair to call Massimo’s pizza the best in Cape Town because to compare it to the other pizza on offer is a bit like comparing the best tennis player to the best squash players. They’re similar but different sports, and these are a different type of pizzas. And pizza is very subjective, everyone has their favourite place. Actually, wait, fuck it -  Massimo’s is the best pizza in Cape Town. It just is. There. Done.

Why?

1. The crust is perfect. Light enough you can imagine eating two pizzas yourself and also crispy and a touch chewy without being doughy. Perfect.

2. The quality of ingredients beats any other pizza I’ve had in town. There are some pizzas out there with good crusts, but at Massimo’s he goes further with toppings. Everything, from the cheese (and he uses a wide variety here) to vegetables to the basic tomato sauce is fresh and noticeably more flavourful than what you’d expect. And with ingredients this good, just two per flavours pizza is good enough. Roasted fennel and some nuts on one. Fresh goats cheese and salsa verde on another. Feta and roasted peppers. You get the idea.

3. Here’s the kicker: a lot of his pizzas are made with ingredients added after he’s cooked the crust. And with no tomato base. Imagine pizza dough, rolled, brushed with garlic butter, cooked to crispy perfection, then a few blobs of superfresh goats cheese added, topped with some thinly sliced mortadella (salami-style meat). The cheese bursts with tart flavour to offset the rich, fatty meat. Or a similar thing with blobs of fresh bocconcini mozzarella balls and parma ham.

That mortadella pizza was my favourite of about the 9 pizzas the six of us ate. With the R115 “pizza feast” option, Massimo just brings out a new pizza every 15-20 minutes, meaning you get to try a bunch and experience a lot more options. A pretty good way to do it, since you’ll just want to keep eating these pizzas, I promise you.

We also had a bresaola, parmesan and rocket starter that was delicious and some roasted chestnuts afterwards. Massimo raves about the chestnuts but personally I think they taste like stale cake. Try for yourself though. They also do daily specials on the menu should you not want to eat any pizza, but that just seems absurd.

www.massimos.co.za

Wednesday Food Porn.

The Eggs Benedict at Bistro 1682 at Steenberg estate. Frontrunner for the best Eggs Benedict in Cape Town in my book. The best in the country? You tell me otherwise. Served on the classic potato rosti, eggs softly poached and smothered in perfect Hollandaise. But what gives it the real edge? Yes, my swine-loving friends, it’s that pork belly bacon on the side. Not a rasher – a whole chunky piece of belly bacon glory thought up by chef Brad Ball though tasting like it’s sent straight from the Man above.

Now THAT’S how you do breakfast. Mmm, someone should come out with the Top 100 Dishes in South Africa, though might offend the Michael Fridjohn’s of the food world…

Get the full story about Bistro 1682 and chef Brad Ball as told by Michael Olivier in this month’s great issue of Crush! here.

Friday Food Porn.

The Lobster Roll. Glorious, isn’t it? You can pick ‘em up all along the east coast of the US at little roadside lobster shacks, and they’re AWESOME. The worst part about looking at these is you can’t go get one anywhere in Cape Town. Why don’t we get the local equivalent of these? It’s crayfish season now… and I’m craving one of these bad boys… with a little slaw and fries on the side. Man, I’d cut off my left arm – wait, in light of recent movie releases, we won’t be using that analogy – but I could really use one of these. With a few slices crispy bacon included. For lunch. Now.

The Test Kitchen.

What a lunch. Myself and a friend, writer and fellow maniac also named David hit up Luke Dale Roberts’ new spot for a bite, and it was mostly memorable. Mostly, huh? Well, if it wasn’t for all the Pinot Noir we drank, it’d probably all be memorable, but hey, you can’t keep every memory, so I’ll take the ones I left.

We rolled in at 1.40pm on a scorcher of a day and smashed a bottle of Joostenberg Chenin Blanc / Viognier in about 30 minutes. Simple and sharp but damned refreshing, that stuff, which is just the kind of thing you need to acclimatise to The Test Kitchen. You see, there’s a good reason it’s not called The Test Restaurant or The Test Bistro. Unlike most other restaurants, you don’t actually eat in a separate room here, you eat in the kitchen. The action is 2 metres away. There’s Luke, right there, sprinkling something onto something else while three other chefs move swiftly between stove and counter and fridge and shelf and the steam billows out pots and the heat is, well, you’re in a working kitchen, so wear some antiperspirant.

Ice cold white wine did the job. And a foie gras dish with soft-boiled quail egg and truffle. At least that was how I remember it. And it was bloody delicious, despite the pungency of the truffle challenging the foie gras a tad. We then hit the rock shrimp tempura roll and rainbow trout tartare. Then two portions of beef tataki. The lone issue I had with these three different dishes was the rice on the tempura roll coming loose. But I’m spotting pimples on a supermodel here. The last time I looked, Luke wasn’t Japanese so this is easily forgivable, more so considering how tasty the crunchy rolls were. The tataki and trout were pure genius.

At some point, we started drinking The Yardstick Pinot Noir 2009, made by winemaker Adam Mason of Klein Constantia. It’s subtle, elegant, slightly chalky and offers a full palate of raspberry and cherry fruit. In other words, the two of us rapidly destroyed several bottles without blinking an eye. Jean-Marc, our waiter (yes, they do have good waiters, even though the chefs could pass your dish to you from the kitchen if they chose to), kept the wine nicely chilled for us to help offset the aggressive restaurant temperature.

Some well-fed and well-drunk Belgians departed before us. They stopped to ask if we were ‘food critics.’ Must have been all the hand gestures, “Oooohing” noises and future AA member-style wine consumption that gave us away, or they were accomplished eavesdroppers, but this question started an animated 15-minute discussion on the best eating the Cape has to offer. It ended with one of them promising he could remove a cork from inside a wine bottle with a napkin. What compelled him to show this to us, I don’t know, but after much red-faced effort, the cork trick didn’t work and we all had a good laugh.

I think after the five dishes we’d had the kitchen assumed we were done and had begun packing up, so it was too late to order the pork belly on the menu. No sweat, Luke rustled up two new pork belly dishes, served with Asian vegetables and asparagus. A moment’s pause for how much this dish humbled my taste buds…

…

…

…okay, good.

Once we’d eaten the pork we were either the last table there or were just behaving like it. We started questioning the chefs’ Birkenstocks. We let off random shouts of joy. We took pictures of Cute Emo Chef ascending the red ladder. We fawned over Luke before he left. We tried to get coffees from Espressolab across the courtyard. We drank more wine. We harassed Wickus the sorbet guy because we loved his sorbet so much. We said “Cheers!” and high-fived a lot. We gave each staff member a French name. We tasted elderflower cordial. I made some undecipherable notes in my journal. We came up with uncountable new business ideas (none I can remember now), as one does. And we certainly weren’t quiet, so some serious patience exhibited by the front-of-house team. They let us be, drunk and happy.

Which was just how we left The Test Kitchen: drunk and happy. This is food to match the best on offer. And true to Cape Town form, you can roll in wearing a pair of Havaianas and enjoy it when you feel like it. If The Test Kitchen were in London or New York, it’d be booked a month in advance. Two months, easily. It’d also probably be filled with pompous long-nosed vultures crooning for overpriced Burgundy. Thankfully, it’s in Cape Town and filled with a healthily casual crowd drinking local Pinot Noir. This is fine-dining 2.0 on your doorstep. Go and embrace it.

www.thetestkitchen.co.za

Woodlands Eatery.

I’m probably the last person to care about how a restaurant looks. I’d rather eat great Asian noodles bought from a dodgy cart on the side of the street than average noodles (which are street food anyway) served with ornately painted chopsticks in an expansive restaurant. That said, when you get great food in a beautiful space, it’s hard to beat. Emily Moon outside Plett is very close to one of those places. Sadly the food just falls short of the drool-worthy surroundings and annoyingly perfect African chic restaurant design.

This isn’t the case at Woodlands Eatery in Vredehoek, where the food is as delicious as the design is beautiful.

The chef turns out what could be called haute comfort cuisine, tasty favourites but done better than the norm. The menu changes but offers goods from their wood-fired pizza oven as well as items like the classic burger, grilled linefish and fishcakes. Except the fishcake might be made with fresh tuna, hence what I mean by ‘better than the norm.’ There’s also cocktails, Darling Brew on tap and the wine list is small but with the right choices, and reasonably priced. Oh, and a very cool cast concrete bar. The kind you can imagine drinking a lot at, though be warned: these are the highest bar stools in Cape Town, so don’t fall off.

Then there’s the design of the place. “Gorgeous,” and that’s said in the softest De Waterkant accent you can imagine with your pinky raised while you sip your Pimm’s. The new owners completely stripped the place (previously Yum Restaurant) and reinvented it. A mix of green and blue tones, concrete floors, unevenly hung lampshades, quirky art resides with 80′s restored retro furniture, or what looks like retro but I suspect was all made new from scratch. Even the soundtrack is pretty here. Expect the attractive young Cape Town interior design crowd to flock here in droves.

Overall, the restaurant is done in a style that makes you feel instantly comfortable, matches the unpretentious food and suggests you do more than just grab a bite here. Rather have lunch then laze the afternoon away on the couch outside.

I predict Sunday lunch tables to be booked out on a weekly basis pretty soon.

Oh, ironically, the owner/chef used to be the chef at Emily Moon. Seems he’s got it 100% right this time, a bonus for us Capetonians.

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Woodlands Eatery, Vredehoek (just above Deer Park). 021 801 5799.

My Last Meal.

I’m not sure how many of you have thought about your last meal, but I’m sure a few have. The very last meal you get to eat on earth, what would you choose? It’s a toughie. Well, it was for me, until a good friend emailed me this beauty. Ladies and gentlemen, lovers of swine and pursuers of pork, may I present the Whole Hog Menu from B&B Ristorante in Las Vegas.

It’s brought to you by US celebrity chef Mario Batali, the true Lord of Bacon and oversized orange Croc-wearing pony-tailed ginger behind my favourite expression, “Wretched excess is barely enough.” Let’s just have a look on there, what do we have… (Cue the holy-angels-harmonising-from-above sounds) Pig Tail – check. Prosciutto – check. Pork loin – check. Cotecchino (giant pig sausage) – check. Porchetta di Testa (deboned pigs head marinated for a couple days, then rolled up and roasted) – check.

Holy crapballs! Kill me now, but let me eat this all before.

(Mario “Lord of Bacon” Batali. The man has no style, but he can cook pig like a God.)

Vegas has become another dining capital in the US, with pretty much the entire Cooking Channel of celebrity chefs having their own restaurants. Some more than one. I ate at the Rum Jungle when I was there a few years back (cue Swingers clip: “Vegas, baby! Vegas!”). There wasn’t any Butcher’s Ragu Rigatoni, but they did clear the tables away at 11pm and the entire place turned into a heaving nightclub. But that’s another story.

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ps – thanks for the menu Molly!

Mess.

Being based in Cape Town makes it easy to assume all great things happen in Cape Town. Or it’s a self-defence mechanism to hide the fact that we all very well know that there’s a lot of great stuff happening in Joburg and one or two good things in Durban. And a few things elsewhere. Either way, here’s some news. It would appear that Joburg has one of the coolest supper clubs around: Mess.

It’s run by Kathryn White & Jono Cane, who are two creative individuals. The one is a published writer and the other an artist/photographer. And based on their blog they appear to be ridiculously talented in the kitchen, naturals behind the camera and also really really really good-looking. They’re also sharp enough to realise that if you find an empty spot in the inner city somewhere and cook up a gourmet feast, invite 20 interesting people and allow plenty of wine to flow, you’re going to have a bloody good time. Capture some quirky shots and post online, together with some other musings on food, wine and anything else that comes to mind, and you’ve also got a pretty good blog too. And that’s Mess, a joyous dinner party in a random Joburg location. Except they call it, “a food experiment.”

Sadly I haven’t eaten at Mess, but it looks like they’ve cooked up some awesome stuff. Turkey with beans & almonds. Warm liver puree. Fish veloute. Steak tartare. Chourizo with white beans & chili. There are some unique opinions, interesting links, artistic photos and very hipsterish people on their site, which documents the various dinners they’ve done. Go have a browse. It made me hungry. It made me thirsty for red wine. It made me want artichokes. It made me wish I could pull off the retro bicycle with casual v-neck look. And it made me wish I had the skill to pull these dinner events off. Oh, well, at least I can go buy some artichokes. Oh, and drink some red wine.

www.themess.co.za

On another, glorious sun-shining-through-the-clouds, note, I also came across this little gem (below) on themess.co.za. Awesomeness. Where can I order a poster?

ps – thanks to MakethMan for the heads up on Mess.

Subway.

Don’t do it.

www.subway.co.za