There are people who come and take all these pictures before they eat,’ says Cape Town chef Harald Bresselschmidt. ‘It’s another story, another generation, something’s changed.’
Bresselschmidt grew up on a dairy farm in Germany’s Eifel region, near the Belgian border. In 1996, having cut his teeth at places like The Savoy in London, he opened Aubergine in a 200-year-old house in a tucked-away part of Gardens. Almost 30 years later, it’s the longest running fine-dining establishment in the city. He reckons, though, that Aubergine is becoming increasingly ‘niche’ because of his unapologetic refusal to follow dining trends.
‘We didn’t change our style even when the fad was molecular dining, and we never went in for foams and smoke. I did my chef training 44 years ago, learnt a classical Mediterranean style. And I keep that going. We cook our sauces properly, and we are defending textures and hot food and plates with decent portions of meat.’
Of folks who spend the entire meal photographing his food, he says: ‘What can we do? We have to smile and accept it, but it’s potentially irritating to people sitting at the next table who came for food and wine but inadvertently end up in someone’s photo shoot.’He says many chefs don’t do hot food anymore. ‘Everything is prepared and dressed up, but it’s lukewarm.’
Aubergine’s owner-chef Harald Bresselschmidt aims for balance on the plate, some- thing achieved with this dessert of lime gastrique, fennel and pineapple.
Of folks who spend the entire meal photographing his food, he says: ‘What can we do? We have to smile and accept it, but it’s potentially irritating to people sitting at the next table who came for food and wine but inadvertently end up in someone’s photo shoot.’
He says that while food’s aesthetic matters, ‘the most important thing is deliciousness, texture, and the marination of food from the bottom up and not from the top down.’
He says newfangled, ‘extremist’, trend-focused places do well, but tend to close after a few years. ‘They’re unsustainable because they’re going too hard, too extreme.’ And, of course, because they’re chasing trends.
While food fads come and go, he’s trying to serve food that’s as close as possible to the classical cuisine that’s worked for centuries. ‘If you’ve got a great product, why try to fix it?’
He’s aiming for ‘balance on the plate’. ‘Rather than playing the whole piano in one dish, I generally use only about five ingredients on a plate. Each ingredient must stand for itself and at the same time, it must all come together, to make the dish interesting until the very final mouthful.’
He says honest deliciousness needs depth of flavour and complexity. ‘Good taste comes from marination. We marinate all our meat and fish properly, and when we make sauces, soups, bisques and bouillabaisses, we cook with proper stocks and wine to achieve balance.’
Which is not to say that Bresselschmidt is stuck in the past. ‘It’s not like in a classic French restaurant where you get heavy food and butter sauces. We have a feel-good approach. Lighter-style wines with less alcohol, olive oil rather than butter and cream.’ Aubergine has its own garden, so produce is homegrown and organic, and the meat is free-range or wild.
‘We want you to feel good after a delicious meal, not saturated and heavy.’
He says he is ‘sort of moving with the times, always going forward’, albeit without compromising for the sake of fickle tastes dictated by social media.
One Cape Town restaurant where you won’t feel out-of-place whipping out your camera is The Wes Bistro & Bar, a visually zany, but gastronomically classic French bistro in the city centre. Its décor is inspired by the stylistically idiosyncratic film director Wes Anderson, while chef Pete Goffe-Wood’s food takes things back to basics with a menu brimming with dishes that have survived the test of time.
And there’s butter, too, paired with a proper portion of properly cooked entrecôte (ribeye) – with frites, naturally. There’s also a creamy, garlicky moules marinière, also served with frites, chicken liver parfait with toast and pickles, steak tartare prepared at the table, and a sharing-size Chateaubriand.
Behind the scenes at Seebamboes are chefs Adéle Hughes and Anouchka Horn, and artist Lisbet Jooste. Their venison tataki with pickled veldkool (dune cabbage) dish is among many that prioritise deliciousness over any inherent ‘cool’ factor.
The food may be rich, even indulgent, but The Wes focuses on what many of us, perhaps exhausted by too many over-elaborate and over-the-top multicourse menus, have secretly been craving: good food, properly cooked and without the need for extensive table-side explanations. The Wes may be visually whimsical, but its food is uncomplicated, nostalgia-inducing and recognisable, transporting you to the heart of Paris without being befuddling or tricksy.
There’s a similar lack of confusion and pretense at Kloof Street’s ëlgr, a restaurant that consistently overdelivers without the hype and swagger. Hidden away downstairs from a 24/7 cannabis shop, it’s owned by Jesper Nilsson, a Swedish-born chef who moved to South Africa when he was 19.
Although he’s worked in Scandinavian kitchens, he doesn’t identify as a ‘Nordic’ chef. ‘The places I’ve thrived have been multicultural,’ he says. Rather than reflecting any specific cuisine type, his menus revolve around food and flavours he loves. Which run the gamut from pizza napoletana to Swedish-style charcuterie and Middle Eastern manakeesh.
‘I cook what I like and keep things scaled back. I’ve done fine dining, but it’s not me.’ Nor is he a chef who likes dressing food up to look fancy on the plate. ‘I really like food to be food – and I want food to look like food, too.’
Jesper Nilsson, ëlgr’s owner-chef. Dishes at ëlgr, such as this line fish with butter beans, kale, smoked tomato, green olive, parmesan and sage pesto, evolve out of research and a relentless quest for deliciousness.
Nilsson’s menu is testament to this belief in the sovereignty of ingredients. Dishes don’t have names, but instead, the individual elements are listed. It might be ‘potatoes, rosemary-and-lemon salt and tzatziki’ or ‘yellowfin tuna, ash-covered goat cheese, orange, jalapeño, green garlic and red onion’, but you can be assured that tremendous effort will be taken to make those ingredients shine.
‘It’s about respecting each element for what it is, but also seeing how we can put the main ingredient together with something that might not usually be found on a menu, so there’s an opportunity for discovery with every dish we create.’
The secret, Nilsson says, is the research he puts into every dish. ‘When originating a dish, I research deeply to figure out that little secret or a twist to unlock its full potential.’
His aim is to get as much flavour into the dish as possible, maximising its deliciousness. ‘Never underestimate the value of slow-cooking an onion,’ he says.
This centralising of cooking’s primary objective – creating something both nourishing and delicious – is also what drives Neil Swart and Anouchka Horn, the duo behind Belly of the Beast and Galjoen, two exemplary Cape Town restaurants on Harrington Street, both with a reputation for zero-wastage cooking and a menu based on what they’re currently inspired to cook. Often it’s simply something they’ve been craving. Above all, though, they’re focused on making great-tasting food.
Swart and Horn believe there’s been a rash of restaurants that use presentation to compensate for flavour. ‘They put so much time into making something look like a beautiful pear, but then it tastes nothing like a pear,’ Swart says. ‘That upsets me.’
He says it started going wrong when chefs lost their minds to ‘gels and foams’.
‘The wastage in those types of kitchens is insane,’ Horn says. ‘They’ll throw away masses of food to get some tiny morsels for the pretty picture on the plate.’ She says it’s unsustainable and an insult to the farmers – and the animals whose flesh gets wasted.
‘There’s a lot of hiding behind cool ingredients,’ Horn says. ‘But even if you have the priciest ingredients in the world, you still need to make it delicious.’ Horn and Swart say the kitchen is where the flavour of an ingredient should be heightened – not only to make it more delicious, but so that diners know what they’re tasting and remember it too. Restaurants should preferably maximise food’s impact on diners while minimising their impact on the planet.
Similar principals apply at their new eatery, Seebamboes. Here, they teamed up with another ethically-minded, highly creative chef, Adél Hughes, to create a 20-seater in the narrow, intimate mezzanine space above Galjoen.
At Seebamboes, they’re playfully reclaiming, deconstructing and reimagining the good old ‘surf-and-turf’ concept, applying the fundamentals of good cooking and out-of-the-box thinking to create delicious food.
And while there are some unusual ingredients, they’re emphasising simplicity: lamb chops with peppered seaweed salt cooked over the fire; octopus with roasted ripe tomatoes; venison tataki with veldkool (dune cabbage); shoestring fries with bokkom butter; and vegetables cooked inside a kelp stem, cut open at the table.
What they’re not doing, Horn says, is trying to be cool and trendy. ‘We’d never use ingredients simply because they sound cool.’
‘First and foremost, we’re striving for that balance of flavours that we experience as deliciousness,’ says Swart. ‘It’s not about putting ice cream and seaweed together to be cool. We start with whether or not that combination is delicious. And, if it looks good on the plate, great. If it happens to be cool, bonus.’
Marble’s otherworldly reinvention of Key lime pie and Marble Cape Town’s head chef Matt van Niekerk gives a final touch to a dish before it leaves the kitchen.
Another new restaurant with the cool factor already baked in is the Cape Town offshoot of the David Higgs-conceived Marble, which has, since 2016, been perfecting the art of simple-but-elevated dining in Johannesburg. ‘Everything on our menu leans towards simplicity and we love the slight juxtaposition between the rusticity of food cooked with fire and the elegant environment,’ says Higgs. ‘Sometimes you just want to give people what they want to eat; it’s not always about the overly fancy or serving overly conceptual food.’
Higgs says a big focus on the menu is flavours that ‘we as South Africans can’t resist’. And there’s that primordial connection with the flame. ‘Everything, whether it’s a steak, a sauce or a salsa, originates from the fire and there’s always beautifully seasoned meat, which we don’t smother in sauces because we want you to taste the star of the show.’
It’s definitely not a braai, though. There’s plenty of top-grade meat, but its success stems from using different fire-cooked techniques to maximise the flavours in unexpectedly nuanced dishes. Take the Chalmar ribeye, wood-fired and served with grilled green beans, edamame, confit onions and a romesco sauce. It’s an uncomplicated classic but crowned with a smoked bone-marrow salsa, made by roasting onions in the pizza oven until they turn black, caramelising naturally before being blended with habanero and leeks and bone marrow. In other words, a lot of effort in order to maximise flavour.
‘In recent years at Marble Johannesburg, I’ve started introducing the classics organically,’ says Higgs. ‘They’re classics because they’re bestsellers. And it takes me back to where it all started: cooking very simply, on fire. Just a piece of fish cooked over the coals and eaten around the fire. That’s something I’ve always loved, and I love sharing that almost primordial eating experience in this sophisticated restaurant environment.’
Keith Bain
