Some meals are worth a drive, although this place is a neighbourhood eatery. I just don’t happen to live nearby. Maybe I should relocate… because that’s how good it is.
What constitutes the ideal restaurant, the one you’ll go back to again and again? Is it the one that offers the world’s best food, on your plate, looking good enough to frame and hang on the wall? A posh nosh palace where you pay brain-squelching prices for plates of exquisite morsels that bear little resemblance to the ingredients they are made of?
The one that the big restaurant guides fawn over? Not at all. My idea of the perfect restaurant is the neighbourhood eatery where there’s a passionate chef who just wants to please you and your palate with the kind of food that makes his heart sing.
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And therefore yours. The kind of chef whose reason for waking up in the morning is to cook fabulous food. And you can taste that passion in every mouthful.
This “perfect restaurant” doesn’t have a theme. It has a heart. It’s not a pizza or pasta palace.
It’s not a grillhouse or a seafood specialist. It’s not Asian or Greek, Mexican or French, but it may have elements of any or all of those, if the chef just happens to love this or that dish from that particular country or cuisine. I found my new favourite restaurant last June, when I found myself in the vicinity for a night.
Then I returned to it, last Friday, which I’d promised The Foodie’s Wife I’d do soon after we returned to Cape Town. Why would this be? I had no idea what I’d order this time.
Last June I had an abalone starter, which was delightful, and a roast duck main course, which was textbook. It was served with confit potato and a Van der Hum liqueur jus, sweetly alluring and a real spoil. You know a restaurant has impressed you when you can remember the taste of a slice of duck and its heady sauce half a year later.
But I knew I wanted to try something different this time. So I ordered the crayfish bisque, finished with brandy and cream. You have no idea how good this was.
I didn’t want that bowl of soup to end. I was resentful when my spoon had scraped up the last morsels from every corner of the bowl. I was tempted to plead for our waiter to come back with a tureen of it and a huge empty ladle and fill my bowl up, yes please, and yes again please.
It’s the kind of dish that makes you greedy. And green. A lot of time must have gone into the rendering down of crustacean shells to achieve the intensity of that bisque.
No effort must have been spared to get that level of deep, madly satisfying flavour. A five-star dish? Not nearly close enough.
Start with 10 and keep going up. So where are we? Yes, I’ve kept you waiting, I know, because I wanted to talk only about the quality of the food before painting a fuller picture.
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