Laurent and Cyrillia Deslandes have moved Bizerca uptown to Heritage Square, where their premises include the wind-protected courtyard at the square’s heart, and the masterstroke is that, while settling into the new space and giving it their own understated style, they also added something akin to placing a striking centrepriece on a dinner table to provide a talking point: an entire wall of the restaurant interior has been turned into a vertical herb garden.
Restaurants
Test-driving The Test Kitchen
History repeats itself. La Colombe had a brilliant chef who grew an international reputation for the Constantia restaurant and earned it a slew of awards. Then he left and started his own, more modest, eatery. La Colombe found a brilliant replacement, who clawed back its international reputation and earned it a slew of awards. But now he too has left and opened his own, more modest, restaurant.
Restaurants
Cape Town squares up to its street life
The verkrampte mindset of the perpetrators of apartheid sucked all of the potential for fun out of life and it would have been crass to have partied openly in the face of what was going on. But we could live in hope and try to imagine that world beyond our grasp, where the fall of a leaf on the cobbles at your feet could silence the distant bomb. Things have come so far from those dark-heart days. St George’s Mall is lined with cafés and restaurants from Wale to Riebeeck. The square has finally started to resemble the kind of square you find in a city such as Amsterdam or the Old Town Square in Prague, another city with a bleak past.
Cook
Pigging out with tamarind and lacquer
Pigs, or hogs, as Americans prefer to call them, are said to be the animal to which we are most closely related. This is a strange assertion. Surely we’re more like baboons? I know some people who are.
A brief history of South African food
Cape Malay Cuisine
Cape Malay curries are many and varied, but you cannot leave the city without trying at least one authentic lamb or chicken curry, or a mutton or chicken salomi (roti).
Cook
A method for cooking pasta you cannot refuse
If your pasta is less than perfectly al dente, scowling, toothless crones swathed in black cross themselves when you come near, then scurry away down dark alleyways burbling in Latin.
Restaurants
Short-order menu has me on my bicycle
Apparently my facial expression said, “Well, you know what you can do with your concept”, and 10 minutes later we were at Bombay Bicycle Club way up Kloof Street.
