from our vegetable supplier, we use herbs called Katokbos which is a wild, indigenous rosemary. We use buchu, which is becoming quite popular around the world, but it is only grown in the Cape region, it doesn’t grow anywhere else in the world. It is used a lot in tropical fruit juices, or in wine gums, the blackcurrant flavours, I recognise it now when I eat a wine gum, perfume like Hugo Boss also uses it, it is very fragrant and also very good for you.
What about meats and fish?
We have a lot of different type of antelope, buck, ostrich and wildebeest. We use a game farm where we have an agreement, they tell me what they are shooting that day, I say if I’m interested and they’ll go and shoot them and hang them for five days. I’ll get say six saddles and we hang it in our special cool room for another two weeks and then we de-bone it and weigh the loins and the fillets and say we have 8kilo of loin, one kilo of fillet, and you send them the money based on that - it is largely based on trust.
We also have fantastic oysters, some crab but not a lot, with fish it really depends on what is going at that moment. We can’t complain, our produce is so beautiful but you also have to respect the fact that certain things are not there in certain seasons, I don’t use Spanish this and French that and German that, I use African, that can be challenging sometimes, but also I don’t want to use what everyone else is using.
As a woman in the industry, how has your experience been - has it been a bit of a battle?
Yes. I think it is definitely a man’s world out there, but I don’t think that means women are not able. I have had to fight to get the respect, especially with more technical things in my kitchen like dealing with my stoves and dealing with all of that stuff - you almost have to fight that little bit harder to show them you do know what you are talking about.
I took over from someone who had been doing it for a long time and had a lot of respect from people in the industry. I think any profession is tough and I think in any profession when a woman turns into a mother it becomes tougher! When you are working with food, you don’t think about anything else, it is like wow, it is so exciting that the hours and all of that becomes part of the thrill.
Do you still get that thrill now then do you?
Yeah, it is exciting, especially when you get to travel and I can take one my chefs with me. Being in a new kitchen and seeing people cook in different ways, constantly being inspired, it doesn’t stop, it only stops when you choose not to be inspired anymore. If you really love the food then you must do it, there are definitely easier ways to make money but if it makes you happy do it.
You did Obsession at Northcote, what made you want to be part of that?
It is exciting, there were amazing chefs there I shared it with Angela (Hartnett) and with Lisa (Allen), and I know them both so it was a great opportunity. Networking is important, you can stay stuck in your own four walls all the time or you can go out into the world and South Africa is far away from everything. It is easier for us to come to Europe than for Europe to come to us!
And being in the UK, what do you think of British cuisine at the minute, what do you think of our chefs and what they are producing?
I think it fantastic, 20 years ago I came to London for a week, this was after I started my first menu, every day we did lunch, dinner, lunch dinner; we went everywhere. We went to Gordon Ramsay Hospital Road, The Sugar Club, we went everywhere and we ate ate ate ate, but every restaurant had fois gras with corn cakes on the menu and I am thinking what the hell, where is the originality? That was 20 years ago, everyone was serving the same kind of food, it was obviously good quality but a lot of it was the same, and I think that has also changed now, there is more uniqueness.
Back to your menu, what dish would you say sums you up, do you have one?
I think it is a combination of things that we do. We are in the height of summer now and we have these beautiful sour figs, where we take the inside flesh of the figs and we make a marshmallow of lovage and then we make our own ricotta of amasi, a soured cows milk drink, with a very airy pistachio crouton and then we dust it with a Granita of Eugenia which is a plant. I really think 95% of the population in South Africa doesn’t know that you can eat it! We dust that over the dish which is almost like a very textural salad, like a three bite salad.
A lot of the menu is about where do you start thinking about something? So the dish I’ve just described comes from the fact we just started our own vegetable garden and a lot of these things come from our garden.
Other than your own restaurant, what is your favourite local restaurant?
One of my favourites is Bread and Wine. Neil Jewell, executive chef, is a British chef from South End on Sea who came to Africa 15 years ago and had a dream to produce everything in the restaurant himself. He started getting very serious about making charcuterie and he is really recognised in South Africa now as the charcuterie king and he makes such beautiful things.
