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…
- First morning coffee: Deluxe Coffeeworks
- Coffee & croissant: Jason (ex-Jardine Bakery)
- Hangover breakfast: Sidewalk Cafe
- Classy breakfast: Table Thirteen
- Brunch: Bistro 1682
- Saturday morning beer: Neighbourgoods Market
- Healthy lunch: Cookshop
- Lunch and the paper: Mozzarella Bar
- Quick sandwich: Jason (ex-Jardine Bakery)
- Unfussy lunch with a mate: Mano’s
- Classy lunch with a mate: Dear Me
- Power lunch: Caveau
- Long boozy lunch: The Foodbarn
- Very low-key lunch: Dias Tavern
- Hipster lunch: Superette*
- Sunday lunch: Woodlands Eatery
- Winelands lunch: Bar Bar Black Sheep
- Early afternoon espresso: The Power & The Glory
- Drinks by the pool: Sandy B’s
- Early afternoon beer: &UNION
- Vegetarian meal: Masala Dosa
- Second best vegetarian: Lola’s
- After work drinks: &UNION
- Martini’s: Planet Bar
- Rooftop bar: The Grand Daddy
- Dinner with a mate: Hudsons
- Dinner with the family: Massimo’s
- Dinner with a view: The Roundhouse
- Romantic dinner: Kitima
- Tapas dinner: La Boheme
- Business dinner: Bizerca
- Gourmet experience dinner: Test Kitchen
- Low-key dinner: Nonna Lina
- Zen dinner: Kyoto Garden Sushi
- Tequila-fueled dinner: El Burro
- Classy nightcap: Fatback Soul
- Messy nightcap: Black Ram
- 4am on brandy: The Shack
- 4am on cocktails: Julep
- 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
Last year the first We ♥ Real Beer Craft Beer festival at the Old Biscuit Mill was a huge success. The follow-up happens this Sunday. Yes, the Summer Craft Beer Festival. The 2nd Coming. The Best Sunday Ever. Whatever you want to call it, it’s going to be awesome.
The gist is simple: R30 gets you entry, your own We ♥ Real Beer pint glass, plenty of beer stands, food vendors and some kickass live music entertainment. Beers from &UNION, Jack Black Beer, Camelthorn, Darling Brew and more. And on the food side, I know Jason “Wheat-at-the-Knees” Lilly from Jardine Bakery is making porchetta (rolled whole pig slow-roasted over a fire), plus there’ll be lots more on offer.
What the Angela Lansbury could be better than that?
Well, this: buy ten pre-sale tickets and bonus, you get them for the price of 9. And buying pre-sale tickets means you skip the queue, which was nasty last time. Purchase tickets at &UNION, Superette or contact @weloverealbeer on Twitter or email shaunfrancbond@me.com.
Easy, yes. Great, yes. But, wait, I have something even better than that… (okay, this post sounds like a Verimark infomercial at this point)
Free tickets!! Yup, I have five tickets to give away for this Sunday’s event. How to get them? Simply post a tweet with both #RealBeer and @foodie_za in it before 5pm this Wednesay. Five most interesting/obscure/creative/whacky/funny tweets get a ticket. Done.
We ♥ Real Beer Summer Craft Beer Festival
Sunday, March 20. Old Biscuit Mill. Noon – late.
Superette is very much part of the ‘cool Cape Town’ scene. It’s partly the crowd, a mix of bohemian and hipster folk not short on style or scared to create their own. Plenty of cardigans, beards, stripey tops and enough Wayfarers for a Ray Ban advert. Plenty of pretty girls too (even the chef is pretty here). If you’ve got a style blog, come here for inspiration. It’s also definitely the effortlessly cool design of the place, complete with mismatched tables, bench seating and neutral colour scheme punctuated with canary yellow. It’s also location, location, location, in this case smack in the middle of shabby chic Woodstock, aka creative central. And finally, it’s the knowledge that Superette is owned by Cameron Munro and Justin Rhodes, the talented duo behind the Neighbourgoods Market at the Old Biscuit Mill and the What If The World gallery. Yes, more ‘cool Cape Town’ you’d be hard-pressed to find.
During the day, bright sunlight streams in through large windows that look out onto busy Albert Road and its noisy taxis. A small kitchen pants to keep up with orders, working hard to get you your gourmet sandwich, salad or soup. The menu is very rustic country; things like the All Day Breakfast sandwich and the Pork Belly with Caramalised Onions & Apple are favourites, the latter being one of the best sandwiches I’ve had in Cape Town. In fact, it’s one of the best sandwiches I’ve had, ever. When you’re finished it you just want to go home and get into bed, because you know the day won’t get any better. A solid looking machine pumps out good coffee, roasted by Deluxe, another very ‘cool Cape Town’ spot, and you can also get refreshment via some Brewers & Union beers out the help-yourself retro fridge in the corner. I can think of far worse places to come for breakfast or lunch.
They also do a supper club, usually twice a month. This has run around various themes: I missed the Lagosta lobster one (upsetting!) but made it to the vegetarian one and subsequently a night of Spag Bol after a recent art opening (the What If The World Gallery is upstairs). The spaghetti bolognese was superb, but being a raging carnivore the vegetarian night was a challenge. I survived the quinoa unscathed with much help from red wine and a bottle of grappa. It was pure chance/luck/misfortune/evil that Cameron happened to have that grappa on hand that night and decided to leave it on our table. Big mistake. Half an hour later we’d polished off most of it and I have vague memories of announcing my meat devotion to anyone that would listen and chasing the chef down the side alley as she made a rapid getaway in her car. Eish. Either way, it was a really fun night and luckily they’ve allowed me to return since.
If you’re heading out to Woodstock (antique furniture, anyone?) or the suburbs (why would you?) then Superette makes a great stopoff point for coffee or a bite. There supper club is an awesome vibe too and well worth keeping tabs on to see what’s next. This is rather easy to do through their blog, which is very cool and well-written itself. And yes, Superette oozes cool, but that’s what you get when people head overseas, soak up the best bits of food and culture and bring them back here. You also get one of the best neighbourhood cafés in Cape Town.
www.superette.co.za
My Joburg-based brother decided to visit for a recent weekend, and as a kind-hearted Capetonian it was only right to spend a Saturday showing off the benefits of living in the most beautiful place on earth. So we did a breakfast at the Stellenbosch Fresh Goods market and a spot of winetasting, then some lunch, beers and people-watching at the Neighbourgoods Market which was followed by more Weissbier and weisswurst at my neighbourhood favourite, &UNION, followed by yet more beers at Neighbourhood itself, followed by dinner at Bizerca, cocktails at Julep and the obligatory attendance at Assembly, where Goldfish happened to be playing. Now really, this all had nothing to do with making him jealous, I mean, who would do that to their own brother? Anyways, despite the variety of great places visited in one day, I will never forget the meal at Bizerca.
There are times when you sit down at a dinner table and immediately acknowledge that the next few hours are going to be full of disappointment. This was not one of those times. Everything just went perfectly, so well in fact, that if you’re going to dine at Bizerca, I recommend this is how you do it. We went all out, as you can tell by the high-quality picture taken after several bottles of wine. Firstly, we (three of us) arrived after 8pm, when the place was decently full. Nobody likes an empty restaurant, especially one in the middle of Siberia, as the Cape Town foreshore clearly is on a winter Saturday evening. Secondly, we arrived really hungry. Yes, this is an obvious point when going out for dinner, but more important here, where the varied menu and the creative food specials get one thinking hard about eating more than one starter and main each. But first, the wine – a bottle of Rusticus Viognier 2007 to open proceedings. Full of baked apple, clean citrus flavours and firm minerality, it went perfectly with our starters of raw salmon and goats cheese salad, oysters with ginger and the tuna tartare. Each dish could not be faulted and did not last very long on the plate. And the fish was fresh enough to embarrass a lot of ‘good’ sushi restaurants.
By now we were excited. Three dishes, all equally impressive. This was a good start. Next up, a bottle of Bouchard Finlayson Hannibal 2007. A bit funky on the nose at first, but after decanting, its earthy straight-jacket loosened and ripe red berry fruits were released. We cleaned it fast, along with the food we had it with: duck cassoulet, veal shoulder and pig trotter with seared scallops. Again, each dish was superb, but the pig trotter with scallops painfully tasty, each bite leaving me in a fit of oohing and aaahing.
I love meals like this, where the conversation has no choice but to revolve around how good the food you’re eating is. We were having fun, so decided to continue. Having smashed the Hannibal inappropriately quickly, we ordered a bottle of Vriesenhof Kallista 2004. And some more food, namely a main-sized portion of steak tartare and some eland carpaccio. Being an older vintage, the wine was surprisingly tighter than the previous, showing more concentrated darker fruits, but still quite delicious. The eland carpaccio was great, but the steak tartare… oh boy. This was the best steak tartare I’ve eaten. Ever. Period. Seriously, go and eat it. Go on your own, if you have to. Just do it. It is that good.
After this second round of mains we thought it a good time to stop eating, being overly satisfied and full. But we didn’t. Instead, we had a sneaky shooter of green apple sorbet with calvados, just to clean the palate. Then the chocolate fondant, raspberry ice cream and white chocolate crème brulee. And I don’t even like dessert – I was just eating because everything was so damned good. I couldn’t stop.
When you’re experiencing food nirvana, somehow the size of your stomach expands to match the quality of cuisine. At Bizerca, our stomachs grew a silly amount, proof of the fine work done by Laurent Deslandes and his team in the kitchen. And perhaps to our hedonistic tendancies. This was undoubtedly one of the finest meals I’ve eaten in Cape Town and I can’t wait to return for round two. And three. Oh, and did I mention the espressos and grappas were perfect too?
www.bizerca.co.za
ps – I actually don’t recommend going dancing after such a big meal. Just ask @SiWibb why.
This is a cafe deli on Hatfield Street just down the road from the Engen/Woolworths on Orange. It used to be called Sage deli, when it was populated by a tree-hugging vegetarian set. I don’t mean that all vegetarians are tree-huggers, but the previous owner here used to look like one. Anyways, the point is that it’s been taken over by a new team and with a new name they have brought in new ideas and a new level of quality – one that actually is er, quality. In the morning they have egg and bacon breakfast pies, served with harissa. Quite cheeky, the spicy breakfast option. They also serve smoothies, muffins bacon croissants (yes, please!) and something called a Green Juice. Made from apple, lemons and other green things, I tried it once and it seems to have the same effect as caffeine, yet it contains none. The last person I saw order one happened to be wearing a white kaftan and had a yoga mat under his arm, so you know this stuff is good. He looked very serene.
The menu for lunch here is a battle between sandwiches and the buffet. The sandwiches come with their homemade pate-mayo, which they used to sell out of at the Neighbourgoods Market each Saturday. Very tasty stuff. Especially when spread over roast chicken on rye bread. The buffet can have everything from lentil salad (with or without bacon, but take a guess which one was almost finshed?) to lasagna to curry. There’s a clear Middle Eastern influence on the buffet side, with plenty of spices, chickpeas and other flavours coming through. All good stuff, and the customers – a mix of designer types from Stefan Antoni office next door and flexible types from the yoga studio adjacent – seem to be enjoying it, as the place does a busy lunch trade.
Cookshop Cafe & Deli. 117 Hatfield Street. 021 461 7868.
Who is the Foodie? It doesn’t really matter. Bacon is god. Wine cures anything. If you believe those two facts, then we’re going to get on fine. This means you have discovered the power of food to make life better. This knowledge is imperative to the art of living well.
