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