Culinary capital of the world: Cape Town; top ten foodie cities; four nights in Cape Town; getting there: turn left at Bloemfontein, plus some 1980s nostalgia; oysters at Mount Nellie; three great restaurants: one pan-Asian, one Italian and one uber-fancy;  the bottom line – exciting food that’s still exceptionally good value 

I’m itching to post the fourth and final instalment of This is the House that Roy and Verne Built – especially as we’ve finally moved in: O frabjous day, Calloo! Callay! (Here’s a link to number three.) But Roy and I had four such enjoyable weeks in South Africa a couple of months ago that it would be a pity not to get them on the record.

Cape Town, Culinary Capital of the World

Cape Town was recently crowned the best city in the world for food – can you believe it? That’s according to Condé Nast Traveller’s 2024 Readers’ Choice Awards. And the announcement was coincidentally made on 23 October, just as Roy and I were boarding a Singapore Airways flight from Perth WA to South Africa’s Mother City.

Top Ten Foodie Cities

Here’s the world’s top ten foodie cities, as voted by Condé Nast readers: (If this was one of those moronic Facebook posts, I’d have to divulge to all and sundry that Milan is the only one I haven’t yet been to.)

1. Cape Town, South Africa
2. Milan, Italy
3. Valencia, Spain
4. Tokyo, Japan
5. Porto, Portugal
6. Hong Kong, China
7. Bangkok, Thailand
8. Rome, Italy
9. Singapore
10. Sydney, Australia

Four Nights in Cape Town

Four nights in Cape Town would be nowhere near long enough for a first-time visitor. But I was born in Durban and largely grew up there, taking trips to Cape Town as frequently as I could: first with my parents; later with friends or the Dreadful Boyfriend; then of course with Roy, the Delightful Husband. I fell in love with Roy in a Franschhoek vineyard – Haute Cabriére Wine Farm, to be exact. (Obviously, he had fallen in love with me some time earlier: at first sight, as is only right and proper.)

Getting to Cape Town

Flights to Cape Town were expensive in my youth, especially for an impecunious student. Then you’d have to shell out for a rental car, too. So we mostly chose to drive the 1,900km coastal route. This would ideally be a three-day road trip, stopping over at places like Kokstad, East London, George, Knysna and Plettenberg Bay. I would have included in this list the rather large coastal city between East London and Cape Town that was formerly called Port Elizabeth (or simply PE).

But PE has been renamed Gqeberha, a name that launches with an unctuous click and is practically unpronounceable to anyone who does not speak isiXhosa. Fortunately, Xhosa is the first language of more than eight million South Africans.

Strangely, East London doesn’t appear on the map below, though the coastal resort town of Margate does. (I probably shouldn’t complain, having boldly thieved the map from the internet.)

 

Turn left at Bloemfontein

Or you would drive inland from Durban, turning left at Bloemfontein to approach Cape Town through the arid Karoo. Speaking of the Karoo, my next post will be a photo story of the couple of nights we spent in the atmospheric dorp of Prince Albert on our way from Cape Town to George, where we caught a flight to Durban.

(Just for the record, we flew to Cape Town from Perth WA on Singapore Airlines this time: they have a direct flight that touches down first in Johannesburg.)

Pre-COVID Cape Town with the Campbells

Five years ago, just squeaking in before the Covid era, we flew from Durban to Cape Town with Californian friends Ellie and Steve Campbell, pictured with me above. It was such fun to show them South Africa’s most spectacularly beautiful city. (Click here for that memorable 2020 Cape Town trip; and here for our more recent June 2024 oyster-guzzling get-together with them in Marseillan, France.)

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Out and About in Cape Town

Oysters at the Nellie

On the subject of oysters, these were the first thing to pass our lips after touching down. We’d picked up the hire car – a nippy little Suzuki, perfect for Cape Town’s hilly roads and busy traffic – and dropped off our luggage at the beautiful two-bedroomed flat at 35 Virginia Avenue (booking.com). Though it was a bit early to check in, as the energetic Karen was still cleaning, 11am didn’t seem too early to pay one’s respects to the venerable Mount Nelson Hotel for oysters and a couple of glasses of Boschendal Brut to wash them down.  (Blame the jet lag.)

 

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Coastal Drive

This time, we didn’t get to the winelands; but we did do a long drive that included a meander through Camps Bay and the superb scenery of the 12 Apostles coastal drive, coffee-drinking and seal-feeding at Hout Bay, and lunch at Simons Town. Roy was highly annoyed when I over-tipped the seal man, and said so. My fault entirely: when will I learn not to divulge the amount?

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Cape Town Accommodation

On booking.com, Roy had found us a wonderful two-bedroom apartment in Vredehoek, a peaceful suburb in the immediate lee of Table Mountain. It’s just a short walk from both the Mount Nelson Hotel and the useful Gardens shopping centre. From here, I walked solo one morning down the hill, through Tamboerskloof and Gardens, down the leafy, squirrelly Government Walk, past St Georges Cathedral and then into the rather seamy, smelly thoroughfare known as Adderley Street that runs through the CBD. (I wouldn’t recommend you do the same; or not alone, anyway. Pretty as Cape Town is, personal safety isn’t guaranteed.)

In and around Vredehoek

This historically Jewish neighbourhood has several Art Deco buildings, including the magnificent synagogue in Rabbi Mervish Lane that’s now a furnishings business called Private Collections. Yes, that’s Table Mountain behind it. It would be easy to walk up Upper Buitenkant Street to where you can find one or more trails up the mountain. More than one local warned against doing this alone, however: at least one lone hiker had been attacked and robbed just the previous week. As for descending Table Mountain, it’s a lot easier to take the cable car. (That goes for ascending it too, I suppose.)

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Three Great Meals in Cape Town

#1 SILK Asian Fusion, 108 Shortmarket Street, Cape Town CBD

I like to go by recommendations, especially in a city with such a huge variety of choice. That said, gorgeous god-daughter Kaela – a self-confessed foodie in training – has just completed four student years in Cape Town, and says she’s almost never been disappointed in a restaurant there. (Clearly, she’s nowhere near as jaded or entitled as we are. Yet.)

SILK Asian Fusion was her fabulous suggestion for our dinner with her and Jordyn. The tapas-style menu leans more heavily towards Southeast Asian influences, but not entirely. We started with a dozen oysters between the four of us. Half of the small, creamy morsels from Saldhana Bay came with soy, chilli and spring onion; the others with a lighter mignonette. After that, we each chose three items from the tapas menu and shared the lot. Pan-seared duck breast, salmon tartare with yuzu dressing, Peking duck croquettes, Karaage cauliflower with tahini dipping sauce, crispy mizo-glazed pork belly, grilled tender-stem broccolini, tempura prawns, egg fried rice; and, from the roboyataki grill: Korean BBQ pork ribs, Thai gai yang chicken thighs, tuna tataki, and lamb ribs. Plus one more that I can’t remember, even after having another look at the menu.

Then the matcha cheese cake, plus the trio of ice cream sprinkled with cookie crumbs. Four spoons, please. Verdict? Incredibly good… I wish I could go back tomorrow.

 

#2 Il Leone Mastrantonio, 22 Cobern Street, Waterkant

Herself a chef of note, our friend Karin is a reliable mine of information on the Cape Town restaurant scene. She said this classic Italian joint was one of her and Michael’s favourites, so we booked a table for Friday night. It was lovely. Roy had the polpette di vitello (veal meatballs) and an utterly delicious off-menu special of seafood and cabbage casserole, which no doubt sounded a lot more exotic in Italian.

For me, a memorable insalata Ascalana (salad of rocket, fennel bulb, cherry tomatoes and grana Padano shavings) and the grilled veal rack. I’ve done what I can with the pics below, but moody Italian restaurant lighting does not make for great photographic art. You’ll see further below how much better the iPhone 14 performed in the lovely lunchtime light at Beau Constantia.

#3 Chef’s Warehouse, Beau Constantia

We had lunch at Chef’s Warehouse in Beau Constantia with Ellie and Steve five years ago – see here – so I won’t go into as much detail. If possible, it’s even fancier now than it was then; each dish is so much more complex than its menu description. In fact, by the time our waitron got to the end of each course description, I’d visibly glazed over and forgotten how it had started. (Let’s blame the cocktails and wine for that.)

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$$$ The Bottom Line $$$

It’s generally agreed that prices have risen hugely in South Africa, as they have all over the world in these inflationary times. SA is no longer a cheap destination. Roy commented that while a pair of South African retail giant Woolworths chinos cost just R500 (A$42), about the same as you’d pay at H&M or at Uniqlo, virtually the same thing at Country Road – a concession within Woolies – cost three times as much.

Here’s an even more outrageous example. Having run out of dental floss, I was astounded to have to pay more than three times as much as I do in Australia. Retail giant Clicks in Umhlanga’s Ocean Mall charged me R93.60 (A$7.80) for 50 metres of Oral B Essential mint floss; at Chemist Warehouse in Joondalup, it’s A$2.50. (And it’s not made in Australia… according to AI, anyway.) Furthermore, the same item costs £1.25 in the UK – that’s equivalent to about R23, one fourth of the price at Clicks.

Maybe not an actual retail giant, my BFF Sally’s husband, Jon, has a lifetime’s experience of on-the-ground trading, including a family history of owning and running remote, rural African trading stores. “It’s a question of volume,” he explained. Only a tiny percentage of South Africa’s population (about 60 million, if you were wondering) are in the market for this niche first-world product, pushing up the true cost of giving it shelf-space.

Dining out – still good value

It’s also true that dining out in South Africa remains good value. After the past five years of Western Australia’s often mediocre restaurant menus, high prices and frequently lacklustre service, it’s a huge pleasure to be served by the generally well-trained and almost universally warm and gracious wait-staff that you find throughout South Africa – from the bubbly Vida e Caffe barista at a bland highway fuel stop, to Seth, the charming barman/sommelier at Cape Town’s 5-star Mount Nelson

 

It helps that having a few glasses of wine doesn’t literally double the cost of your meal, which is what happens in Singapore, for example. That’s because delicious wines are still inexpensive in South African liquor stores… and restaurants don’t dare to mark them up more than two or three hundred percent.

For example, we bought six bottles of wine on promotion at a Woolworths food store. They included two excellent méthode traditionelle Boschendal Brut (the equivalent of A$17 each); plus a couple of Kanonkop Kadette Rosé and a couple of Fairview Shiraz, each under A$8.

Check, please!

Here’s what it cost at the three restaurants reviewed above. For two courses each and a bottle of Montepulciana plus tip, classic Italian Il Leona came in at around R1,500 (about A$125 for two, not bad). For four hungry diners at Silk Asian Fusion sharing a dozen oysters plus 12 tapas, two desserts and two bottles of wine, it was roughly R2,500 (about A$210 for four or A$50 a head – great value!). But for the uber-fancy Chef’s Warehouse, the tasting menu plus one cheese and two desserts, along with four hours’ worth of higher-end wine ran to around A$200 a head.

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Next up?

Next up, and as quickly as I can make it happen, is a photo-essay on the quirky Karoo town of Prince Albert.