Tag Archives: ‘Hunger for Freedom’

WhaleTales Tourism, Food, and Wine news headlines: 13 March

WhaleTalesTourism, Food, and Wine news headlines

*   Cape Town will be jazzing it up on the last weekend of the month, with not only the sold-out Cape Town International Jazz Festival taking place at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from 28 – 30 March, but the inaugural Sounds Fringe Festival will offer 60 performances between 27 – 30 March.  The list of performers includes  The Rudimentals, Spencer Mbadu, Dan Shout, Gerald Clark, Beatenberg, Sterling EQ, Saudiq Khan, Blackie Tempi, and Touchwood. Norwegian trumpeter Arne Hiorth will perform with a choir of 100 singers.  Venues are concentrated around Wale Street, at Mandela Rhodes Place, The Twankey Bar, The Reserve at The Taj, Motherland Coffee Company, The Crypt Jazz Restaurant, the Iziko Slave Lodge, and Inn on the Square. The goal of Festival founder Frank Gormley is to position Cape Town as a city of musical note.

*   Anna Trapido has been appointed as Editor of Rossouw’s Restaurants, the guide started by JP Rossouw but which he cannot continue with due to his duties as recently appointed Publisher of Platter’s wine guide, and will also handle this role for Rossouw’s Restaurants.  Diners Club bought both the Platter’s and Rossouw’s Restaurants guides last year. Trapido is a former Eat Out Top 10 Restaurant judge, and wrote ‘Hunger for Freedom’ about the food which the late Nelson Mandela liked to eat.  (received via media release from Africa Sky)

*   Cape Town restaurant prices are not increasing because there are more tourists in town, but because food prices Continue reading →

Toffie Food Festival:’Hunger for Freedom’ a ‘gastro-political’ tribute to Nelson Mandela!

One of the highlights of the Toffie Food Festival and Conference was the entertaining and informative talk by Dr Anna Trapido, author of  ‘Hunger for Freedom – The Story of Food in the Life of Nelson Mandela’,  which came alive for all of us through a most unusual lunch. 

Inspired by Dr Trapido’s book, TASTE  magazine and Woolworths had created a 19-course meal, each course individually packaged and numbered, and packed in a  paper bag with a legend, referencing each item with a phase in Madiba’s life.  The idea was that the delegates were to collectively eat their food from the packet as Dr Trapido talked us through each of the stages of Madiba’s life, and explained the meaning of food to him in each of these stages.  It was a tremendous amount of information to comprehend in the hour, and I was very fortunate to obtain Dr Trapido’s notes after the presentation.

Dr Trapido told us that her book is not a cookbook, but rather a ‘gastro-political biography’, and demonstrated that one comes full circle to one’s beginning through the food one eats. Foods we like says who we are, she said, and food can be used to express love, dislike, wealth, poverty, protest, celebration, and reconciliation.  A number of women were important in Madiba’s life in preparing food for him, but are not recognised in his biographies.   Madiba’s fellow prisoners have been interviewed, and tell the same story over and over again.  Telling the story of Madiba’s life via his food is unique.  She quoted Madiba as saying: “I was not born with a hunger to be free.  I was born free. Free in every way that I could know…. It was only when I learnt that my boyhood freedom was an illusion … that I began to hunger for it.”

Madiba’s story commenced in Mvezo, born as Rolihlahla Mandela on 18 July 1918, and here his mother Nosekeni gave him Amasi to drink, still his favourite sour milk drink.  ‘Amasi is the ricotta of Southern Africa’, said Dr Trapido.  Madiba wrote about amasi:“I long for amasi – the food for which I loved to sharpen my teeth and to stretch out my tummy, the act that I really enjoyed, went straight into my blood and into my heart and that produced perfect contentment.” 

As a teenager Madiba’s father lost his job as headman, and he therefore sent his wives and children to their respective traditional homes.  Madiba spent his teenage years in Qunu, his mother’s home, and here he met Winnie Matyolo at school, who became his first girlfriend.  This was a posh family, eating with cutlery.  When he went to eat at her home, they tried to discourage the courtship by preparing a half-cooked chicken and giving Madiba cutlery, which he had never previously used.  The chicken went flying off the plate.  The girlfriend’s sister mocked his inability to eat with cutlery, to which the girlfriend replied that she would teach him.  Each delegate had a chicken wing in their lunch pack, and was challenged to eat it with the plastic knife and fork in our pack!

At the Clerksbury Boarding School Madiba often was given a scone with apricot jam by Mrs Harris, the headmaster’s wife, a ‘royal feast’ for him at the time, and a taste he did not forget.  In 1938 he went to study at Fort Hare University, but was expelled the following year for supporting a strike by the kitchen staff.  Madiba moved to Johannesburg, living with the Xhoma family, and through them he met Walter Sisulu, an ANC activist, and a number of later leaders of the ANC Youth League, Oliver Tambo being one of them.  Through Sisulu, an estate agent who brought lots of conveyancing work to the law firm Witkin, Sidelsky & Eidelman, Madiba was employed as an articled clerk as a favour to Sisulu.  Saving his money to buy candles with which to study through UNISA at night, he was often hungry at work.  His colleague Nat Bregman shared his pastrami sandwich, by asking Madiba to pull it, as we did with our neighbour at the Festival, and this represented the Communist Party, which shared everything, Madiba was told.  In Johannesburg he met the Naidoo family, and Manonomany Naidoo made a meal of crab curry and rice, the first time that Madiba ate curry and crabs, disliking the taste initially, but he became fond of Indian food generally, and crab curry specifically, over time.

In Johannesburg Madiba met Walter Sisulu’s cousin Evelyn in 1944, and they married a year later. They were married for twelve years and had four children.  In this period he became a lawyer, father, and political activist.   Evelyn was a nurse, and kept the family afloat financially initially.  He loved having his own home, and inviting guests, unannounced to his wife, for dinners.  He planted a peach tree in the garden, the fruit of which went into many favorite dishes. In 1952 a Defiance Campaign for the Defence of Unjust Laws was initiated by the ANC, and Madiba was its Volunteer-in-Chief.   In five months after its launch, 8000 people were imprisoned for using ‘Whites only’ facilities.  It led to a six-month banning order, and Madiba was not allowed to leave Johannesburg, or talk to more than one person at one time.  His wife was happy to have her husband at home for dinner more often!  Madiba and Oliver Tambo opened a law firm in 1953, and many cases related to food, drink and land, e.g. women brewing and selling beer in Cato Manor, and prison labourers exploited on potato farms. The ANC’s Freedom Charter was adopted in 1956, but led to the arrest of Madiba and many others, to be released on bail.  It was Madiba’s political commitments and Evelyn’s religious dedication that led to the failure of the marriage, and they divorced in 1957.  Madiba and the Rivonia trialists were served Besan Ladoo by Thayanagee Pillay for the five years of the trial, as were we as delegates.  Black persons were not allowed to drink alcohol, so George Bizos, their lawyer, served small tots of alcohol, in case there was a police raid. 

Madiba met Winnie, the first social worker in Soweto and a very attractive socialite, featured in DRUM magazine, and it was love at first sight, in that Madiba asked her to marry him at the first lunch they had at a Johannesburg restaurant, one of only two at which Black persons were allowed to eat. She was less enamoured with the lunch, as they were served curry, a dish she had never eaten before, and it made her eyes water and her nose run.  They married a year later. For the wedding at Winnie’s family home in Bizana, Madiba and his friends had to obtain special permission to have the conditions of their banning order relaxed, to attend.  Winnie removed the top layer of the wedding cake, and wanted to take it to Madiba’s family in Qunu, but as they only had 6 days before returning to Johannesburg, Winnie returned with the wedding cake. For the next thirty years it accompanied Winnie: For me, it became a symbol of our love.  I kept it in memory of our wedding and in hopes of a life that never was.  There I was, the most unmarried woman.  I had never lived with him…The cake was really all I knew about marriage… I clung to the cake…”.  In 1988 the cake was destroyed, when the family house burnt down in Soweto.

After the treason trial collapsed in 1961, Umkhonto weSizwe was formed, with Madiba as Commander-in-Chief, and the High Command included Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and Joe Slovo.   Madiba went into hiding at Lilliesleaf Farm in Rivonia.  Winnie was smuggled in on occasion, and was very upset when her husband cooked her a lovely steak and pea, and fruit platter lunch, it looking far too perfect, and made her suspicious as to who had taught Madiba.  In 1961 Madiba went on a trip through Africa, to collect monies for the ANC.  On his return, he went to Durban to report back to Chief Luthuli, head of the ANC.  Madiba ate at the home of the Naidoo’s, who made him a feast of chicken and mutton curry.  On his return, Madiba was arrested.  In 1962 Madiba was charged with inciting a strike and leaving the country without a valid travel permit.  He was sentenced to five years on Robben Island.  Food rations were very sparse.  Prisoners went on a hunger strike, and they were punished with hard labour.  A raid of Lilliesleaf Farm led to the arrest of the Umkhonto weSizwe High Command, and Madiba’s link to it was uncovered, and he returned to Pretoria to stand trial.  He had lost a lot of weight, and fellow trialist Denis Goldberg passed him a piece of chocolate, which the judge saw, as it was visible in Madiba’s cheek.  In 1964 the accused were sentenced to life imprisonment, and sent to Robben Island.  Here food was allocated on the basis of population group.  Black prisoners were given a 250g mealie, 250g vegetables, 15g fat, 1 cup of coffee, 55g phuzamandla, 15g salt, and 60g meat per day, without any bread.  Coloured and Indian prisoners were served 250g bread, 250g vegetables, 30g fat, 2 cups of coffee, 15g salt, 60g sugar, and 110g meat.  Only 16 years later the meals at Robben Island were ‘de-racialised’.  Warders and prison gangsters stole the meat and the warders urinated at their food when they worked outside.  Offences by prisoners were ‘rewarded’ with meals being taken away, and rice water only was served to prisoners in the isolation cells (we received some too in our lunch pack, but were advised not to drink it, due to its awful taste).  Food was smuggled in, e.g. by  a Hindu priest, who dropped some chillies on the floor, from which the prisoners used the seeds to plant on the island, to spice up their food, mixed with olive oil which they could request for ‘constipation’ from the hospital, to make their food more palatable.  Dullah Omar’s wife Farida regularly tried to smuggle in food via his briefcase, but it was usually found and confiscated.  She did manage to get bananas through on one occasion.  Messages were transferred from studying prisoners, who had access to cellotape, and sealed messages with it at the bottom of the pots.  At Christmas the prisoners earned the right to buy sugar, dried fruit and cocoa from the prison shop.  Using pieces of bread, cocoa, sugar and currants soaked in phuzamandla, they made themselves a Christmas cake.

In 1982 Madiba, Walter Sisulu and some other prisoners were transferred to Pollsmoor, and here the food was much better. Dullah Omar’s smuggling of his wife’s samoosas, rotis and curries was much more successful.  At this time, then-President PW Botha and Henry Kissinger argued over the release of Madiba over a malva pudding, according to Francois Ferreira, then PW Botha’s chef.  A bout of TB allowed Madiba to be sent to Constantiaberg Medi-Clinic, the first Black patient in this hospital.  Kind nurses smuggled in ‘real’ food, like pizzas, chocolate mousse, and even arranged a Christmas party in his room.  He started learning social mores from the nurses.  In 1988 Madiba was moved to Victor Verster, and lived in a prison warders’ house (now called Mandela House), kitted out with a microwave oven, fridge, stove, toaster, and a personal chef, being Warrant Officer Jack Swart, who taught Madiba to make gemmerbier.  In 1989 Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, and two more prisoners were released, in the same year that FW de Klerk became State President. 

On 11 February 1990 Madiba walked his first steps to freedom out of Victor Verster with his wife Winnie, spoke to the people of South Africa from the Cape Town City Hall balcony, and spent the first night at the home of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.   They didn’t know what Madiba liked to eat, so they prepared Tutu’s favourite meal.  Madiba’s first meal of freedom was chicken curry with rice, and rum and raisin ice cream with custard.   Returning to Johannesburg, he re-connected with Mrs Pillay and Mrs Naidoo, as well as his old colleague Nat Bregman.  In 1992 Madiba and Winnie divorced, and Madiba moved to Houghton.  Xoliswa Ndoyiya is his cook, and has been cooking for him for the past twenty years, making tripe, oxtail, isophu, umbhakho, dombolo and umxhaxha.  Madiba won the Nobel Peace Price with FW de Klerk in 1993. In May 1994 Madiba was inaugurated as the new Present of South Africa.  His inauguration dinner was organised by the National Party, and the meal consisted of some non-South African dishes, such as Mexican chicken and Spanish rice, but potjiekos and bobotie were included on the menu, as was the only traditional dish umngqusho.  The meal was served with Graham Beck sparkling wine.

Madiba used food as reconciliation, and invited all former First Ladies to a dinner.  Betsie Verwoerd declined, but invited Madiba to come for tea in Orania, a White-only community.  He accepted, being the first Black person to visit Orania, and she served koeksisters.  Mrs Verwoerd commented afterwards that Madiba was a ‘real gentleman’.  We laughed when Dr Trapido told a story about a trip by Madiba to the United Kingdon, staying at the Dorchester Hotel, where he missed his traditional food.  He demanded that umphokoqo be flown in from home, the container wrapped up to look like a present, so that it could get through Customs. Madiba’s PA Zelda la Grange was on standby to contact then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to intervene, should the important package not find its way to the Dorchester Hotel!

Madiba met Graça Machel in 1990, and she visited the family home in Qunu with Madiba in 1996 for the first time, making a traditional Mozambican Christmas meal, with prawns, crabs and other seafood.  The family had never eaten such foods, and craved meat, but over the years they have come to love ‘Aunty Graça’s’ seafood.  Since his third marriage, Madiba has been encouraged to breakfast later, and to eat what he enjoys, e.g. Frosties with warm milk, double toffee ice cream, and ribs.  Madiba moved to Qunu recently, and is expected to stay there, having gone back full circle to where he started his love for traditional Xhosa food.

‘Hunger for Freedom – The Story of Food in the Life of Nelson Mandela’,  Anna Trapido.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com  Twitter:@WhaleCottage

Toffie Food Festival: No toffees, über-design, über-promise, under-delivery!

When writing our blogpost about the Toffie Food Festival, we wrote about a number of aspects about the organisation of the Toffie Food Festival and Conference that left much to be desired, the organisers making a number of promises which they did not deliver on.  I expressed my scepticism in the blogpost, but it was the talk by ex-blogger Julie Powell, theme of the movie ‘Julie & Julia’, that made me book, despite the high price tag.  Despite enjoying the morning sessions on Saturday, it was the organisers reneging on the confirmed booked secret dinner venue for Saturday evening that was the final straw, and therefore I decided to leave, with my money refunded, when the organisers failed to fix their acknowledged booking error.

The Toffie (no explanation was given by the organisers for this odd name, and there was no toffee, except at the SA Breweries food and beer pairing) Food Festival was not explained, and probably referred to the City Hall room with a number of stalls, creating a mini market, including stands for Woolworth’s coffee, the Queen of Tarts, Oded’s Kitchen, and a few more.  Another room had a number of beer brands for sale.  A further room sold pies from Jason’s, and here mini-croissants were available, being the over-promised ‘breakfast’!   A further room had a colourful Mexican Piñatas design (the organisers seemed to get their countries mixed up, as a link to Argentina was intended, with a speaker from this country).  The problem with all the extra features was that nothing was explained on arrival, or at the start of the Conference.   The registration desk staff, acknowledging our booking, said nothing about the bookings for the workshops running alongside the Festival, nor about the Secret Dinners, which took place in the homes of a number of hosts on Saturday evening.  One had to find out everything oneself.

The Toffie Food Conference was a one and a half day presentation of a random collection of speakers, some having nothing to do with food at all (these were last minute replacements for initially advertised international speakers, the programme having been amended as late as two weeks before its start, Wolfgang Koedel of Paulaner  Brauhaus and perfumer Tammy Fraser being added). The only common element some speakers had was that they had published books, but there was no theme commonality for the Conference overall.  The venue was a tacky dark room in the City Hall, on a noisy corner with taxi-hooting disturbance from outside, and not in the downstairs main City Hall auditorium, as one had expected.  We sat on uncomfortable cheap plastic chairs which had been wrapped in brown paper (this was the ‘creative’ decoration used throughout), which meant that there was a lot of rustling in the venue when one moved on one’s chair. The organisers clearly struggled to fill the venue, it not being full, and ‘gave away’ tickets on Groupon(unfair to those who paid for the weekend in full), as well as offered seats as give-aways on M-Net.   Even on late Saturday afternoon, free Secret Dinner seats were offered via Twitter!

The organisers of the Toffie Food Festival and Conference were artist Peet Pienaar (a grumpy looking ex-rugby player with a Paul Kruger look, and who has a bizarre CV on Wikipedia, which I should have read before booking) and Hannerie Visser (ex-publisher of VISI and TASTE at New Media Publishing), both of never-heard-of-before The President design agency, with what must be the sparsest website ever seen, with design work done for Babylonstoren, BOS, TriBeCa, Navigator Films, and Bruce Lee magazines!  Neither have any food experience, nor have they organised a Conference before.  Copied from Argentina, they organise secret CHOP dinners in their offices, with Pienaar cooking bizarre meals (e.g. veal brain ravioli, the dinner and drinks costing R350) on a weekly basis.   This concept was built into the Toffie Food Festival, each delegate being allocated to a host, at whose home one would have dinner. Hosts were mainly from the decor design field.  While it was meant to be a random match of delegates with host venues, I liked the sound of GreyLamp, being a pop-up restaurant, and therefore I wrote to Visser, requesting this as my dinner venue.  She agreed by e-mail a few days before the event.  When I found the desk dealing with the dinners, I was given details of a completely different host, an editor of an art magazine, who had nothing to do with food at all!  There was no explanation for the error, and one of The President staff promised to sort it out, promising to find me to confirm the correction.  As I had experienced during the booking process, this promise was not met, and I had to return to the desk again. Lying on the table was a (brown paper wrapped) ‘present’ for me, with the news that I could not attend the GreyLamp dinner, as it was fully booked!  I went looking for Visser, but saw Pienaar first, and he rudely told me that it was tough that they had made an error in promising the venue.  This was echoed by Visser, when I finally found her.  It was the way in which she spoke to me, in that it was her right to take a promise away by making a mistake, that annoyed me.  When she offered to refund the money I had paid in full, I accepted it, as their error was a major let-down.  So while I missed out on Julie Powell’s talk after all of that, I was happy to leave this badly organised space, and was able to follow her speech on Twitter.  I couldn’t help but smile when I saw a number of disparaging Tweets about the poor Braai that closed off the Festival yesterday, the promised Argentinian Asado barbeque having fallen away, and the R150 Braai package (for those that brought partners) consisted of only a chop, a sausage and a roll, once again a false over-promise.

The speakers at the Toffie Conference tried their best to make up for the poor organisation and behind-the-scenes dramas happening outside the presentation venue:

*  Kobus van der Merwe, of the cutest Paternoster eatery Oep ve Eet, which I discovered a year ago, spoke about his love for foraging for West Coast foods in the preparation of his meals, including soutslaai, dune spinach, veldkool, seevygies, waterblommetjies, wild sage, and wild rosemary.    He grows some of his own vegetables and herbs, and has access to free-range farm eggs, Khoisan salt, bokkoms, cow’s milk, and flour close by.  Not only do Kobus’ dishes look beautiful from the colourful wild plants he adds, but he is also inspired by shapes from nature, having developed a breadstick in the shape of a branch, and uses streussel to create the look of soil.  Bobotie made with calamari, meat or vegetables are a staple at his restaurant, as are gemsbok sosaties, he said.  The books by Louis Leipoldt and Renata Coetzee are his food inspiration. Kobus calls his focus at Oep ve Eet ‘Earth-to-plate’, or ‘Terroir food’ His food ideas and creativity in its presentation are well worth a book, but can already be seen on his blog Sardine Toast.

*   Eloise Alemany is a small-print-run publisher of her own books, written in Spanish, and which she described as combination food journal, cultural diary, story book and cook book.  She has French parents, grew up in Japan, ran ID magazine in the USA for a while, before moving to Buenos Aires.  Her passion is photography and publishing, she said.  The choice as speaker was unusual, as many a local cook book writer and publisher could have probably been more useful to food writers wishing to have guidelines about how to get their work published.  Ms Alemany’s books were available for sale, but are not available in English.  The covers of the books ‘Libro de Cocino’ and ‘Cuaderno Dulce’ are beautiful, but have no food in them.  She launched secret dinners in unique venues, such as an art gallery and a shoe shop, each with a theme, first for friends, and then expanded these when the unusual dinners received coverage in the Buenos Aires media.  Ms Alemany described herself as an ‘accumalator’ of beautiful things, which come in useful for the styling for shoots.  Buenos Aires experienced a ‘restaurant food revolution’ after the country’s financial crisis five years ago, and it led to interesting small neighbourhood restaurants opening. She encouraged delegates to stick to their vision, and to take risks in doing so.  Food styling must tempt the reader, it must inspire the reader in giving ideas of how to serve a dish, and it must be a memorable composition, she advised.  She varies her styling, some being busy, and others neutral.  She publishes a print run of 1000 books, distributing her books via small design shops in the main.  She concluded with the advice that one should do what one enjoys, and not that which one is good at.

*   Anna Trapido was a lively and informative speaker about the foods that have shaped Nelson Mandela’s life, being the author of ‘Hunger for Freedom’, and was the theme for the unusual lunch we were served on Saturday.  We received so much information that I have written a separate blogpost about it, to be published later this week.

*   I was very surprised when I saw a Taiwanese Barista featured on the programme, and even more so when I heard him speak his language, having an interpreter with him on the stage.  Once again, I wondered why an international speaker had to be brought in for this talk, when Cape Town has some excellent coffee specialists.  From Twitter, highlights of this talk by World Barista champion Tung-Yuan Lin were his development of Latte Art, going beyond the usual heart and leaf designs. He opened his first coffee shop GaBee six years ago, serving 100 different types of drinks.  After winning the barista competition, he pushed himself to develop new ideas, by using local Taiwanese ingredients such as sweet potato and melon; coffee, soda water and ginger; coffee and grapes to create a ‘red wine’; sweet corn soup coffee; creating ‘drinkable desserts’.  He advised delegates to push themselves to try unique combinations of ingredients to create as drinks.

*   Tammy Frazer’s talk on ‘Gourmand fragrances’ seemed completely out of place at a Food Conference.  Her talk generated few Tweets.

*  Wolfgang Koedel of Paulaner Brauhaus talked about beer, describing it as ‘liquid bread’.  Draught beer is ‘cool and trendy’ again, he said. During the World Cup 72000 pints of Paulaner were drunk.

*   Renata Coetzee wrote ‘Koekemakranka: Khoi-Khoin Kultuurgoed en Kom-kuier-Kos’, a Gourmand World Cookbook Award winner.  Her interest in food culture goes back 60 years, incorporating etiquette and folklore too.  She was particularly interested in African food culture, which had not been written about previously. Early civilisations would have eaten a lot of shellfish, bulbs and wild animals, she said.  The Khoi prepared food in claypots, and through mixing foods, stews were born.  Fat from sheeps’ tails was the most common ingredient of Khoi dishes.  Ms Coetzee has reworked the traditional Khoi recipes to make them palatable for Westerners.

*  Julie Powell’s success as a blogger, and subsequent author, in documenting her cooking of Julia Child’s recipe book in one year, and leading to the making of the movie ‘Julie & Julia’, cost her her marriage, which became the theme of her second book, called ‘Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession’. With her marriage on the rocks, Ms Powell decided to do a butcher’s course, a good escape for her, and she enjoyed ‘hacking up meat’.  It is very ‘hip’ to be a butcher these days, she said. She is concerned about the origin of her meat, and it must be organic, sustainable, and hormone-free.   For her, food has good, joyous, generous and loving memories, as well as nasty and divise memories.  She turns to food in times of crisis. She said that she was judged for being a blogger, and stopped blogging when her first book was published.  She does not follow blogs now, she told Elle Decor.  She watches a lot of TV, but does not watch food programmes, finding them boring. In New York pop-up restaurants and food trucks are a new trend.  ‘Technology and blogging have woven us together and made the food conversation more cacophonous than ever before’, she said.  An increasing number of people want to know where their food comes from ethically and environmentally.  Ms Powell is working on her third book, not specifically about food.

It was interesting that Cape Town Tourism did not sponsor the Toffie Food Festival and Conference, as it did the ‘100 Women 100 Wines’ event a week ago, and they only wrote two Tweets about this event.  One would have thought that the tourism body would offer equal attention to all events taking place in Cape Town, and that it would have wanted to demonstrate its tourism leadership by having a visible presence at the event, given its stated focus on Food tourism.  One wonders what the policy is of Cape Town Tourism in its sponsorship of events, and how it decides which events will receive monetary support.

The Toffie Food Festival and Conference was poorly organised, and their over-promised benefits and poor communication are unprofessional.  They have a lot to learn before they attempt to host another such event next year.

POSTSCRIPT 5/9: Sonia Cabano has written in support of our observation about the lack of value for money of the event, as follows:  “Yes, so ToffieFood was expensive and underdelivered. We all know that, and we are all discussing it”.

POSTSCRIPT 6/9: We copied the above sentence by Sonia Cabano from a comment she wrote to this blogpost.  As the rest of the comment was untruthful, disparaging and defamatory, we deleted it, and posted one sentence from it in the blogpost.  She Tweeted a number of times that she felt that the cost of the Toffie Food Festival was too high, but appears to have subsequently deleted these Tweets.

POSTSCRIPT 7/9: Sonia Cobana has Tweeted her Comment that she sent to this blogpost, which we have not allowed.  She is blatantly dishonest in claiming that she was with me when I talked to the organisers Hannerie Visser and Peet Pienaar.   She walked past us while I spoke to Peet Pienaar, gave him her new recipe book ‘Relish’ launched earlier that day, and walked off.  She was not party to any of the discussions I had with the organisers.  I left the event with a staff member of The President (organisers of the Toffie Food Festival), and not a security person, so that he could collect the delegate badge from me, walking me to my car in an area that is not particularly safe.   It appears that she is Tweeting this disparagement in retaliation to our blogposts about Cape Town Tourism, having hounded me on Friday evening, calling seven times to beg me to not write about Ms Grove anymore, being her friend.  I explained that nothing is written about Ms Grove or Mrs Helmbold in their personal capacity, but in that of their work for Cape Town Tourism.

POSTSCRIPT 10/9:  One of the Surprise Dinner hosts told me today that they had been very disappointed with the organisation, only having 13 of the 30 booked Toffie Food Festival delegates arrive, and many of these were ‘freebies’, who had received the dinner place for free, in a last minute desperate attempt by the organisers on Twitter. Hosts were given a budget of R150 per head for a three course meal, and were paid in Woolworths vouchers by the organisers.  Spier sponsored the wine. One wonders why Woolworths backed an unknown ad agency in putting on a first-time food festival and conference that clearly is not their field of expertise, was not well-organised, and was controversial, sullying their own brand.

POSTSCRIPT 11/9:  In her (libelous) report on the Toffie Food Festival, which she did not attend in full, given that the launch of her new book ‘Relish’ co-incided with Saturday morning of the Festival, for the BY supplement to Beeld, Die Burger, and other News24 titles, Sonia Cabano confirmed the complaints about the expense of attendance.  She gets the Festival cost wrong at R1800 (it was R1710), and writes about the near give-away of tickets on Groupon to fill the Festival.  She also mentions that no speakers of colour were included in the Festival programme, and the disappointing food market, which offered nothing new, most of the stallholders selling their wares at weekly markets too.  She also writes about the complaints about the poor Sunday lunch braai, and that Julie Powell, the keynote speaker, was a disappointment, being ‘babelaas’ from the Secret Dinner the night before (‘…dat haar aanbieding die dag daarna belemmer is deur haar selferkende hewige babelaas’) !  Her report confirms that I made the right decision to leave the Toffie Food Festival on Saturday afternoon, after the Secret Dinner booking mismanagement, which was admitted to by the organisers, and therefore they refunded my fee.

POSTSCRIPT 14/9:  Today we received an e-mail from the Toffie Food Festival organisers, advertising their Toffie Food Festival food tour to Buenos Aires from 23 – 30 October, in conjunction with TASTE magazine, at a cost of R 28426 for a single and R23327 for a double, inclusive of the flight, accommodation and meals.

POSTSCRIPT 20/9:  Dax Villanueva, of Relax with Dax Blog, is also rather critical of his experience of the Toffie Food Festival.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage

Toffie Food Festival: ‘Julie & Julia’ highlight, mix of conference, workshops, mystery meal!

The Toffie Food Festival and Conference, to be held at the City Hall on 3 and 4 September, attracted my attention due to its low-key marketing, odd as it is run by an (unknown) communication agency The President, and as its organisers have had no prior visibility as bloggers or ‘foodies’.  Information about the event has been scant, yet I booked immediately when I saw that Julie Powell, of the movie ‘Julie and Julia’ , is the key speaker. 

The movie ‘Julie and Julia’ ran in Cape Town in my early days of blogging, and I loved it, for its humour in presenting the trials and tribulations of blogging. Julie Powell’s blog ‘Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen’ was published as a book in 2005, and that led to the movie being made, and released in 2009.  Ms Powell has written a second book ‘Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession’, which was published two years ago.

I asked Hannerie Visser of The President why they were organising the Toffie Festival, with no credentials in the food industry.  This was her reply: “Toffie is a series of conference festivals and because food is so linked to cultural heritage it allowed for an interesting conference that everyone can relate to”. Other speakers are:

*   Kobus van der Merwe, chef/owner of Oep ve Eet in Paternoster, and previous web editor of Food24 and Eat Out.

*   Eloise Alemany, ex-editor of ID magazine and now cookbook specialist, from Argentina (leading a Toffie food tour of Buenos Aires in October).

*   Dr Anna Trapido, editor of ‘Hunger for Freedom’, the book that documented Nelson Mandela’s food likes and dislikes in the different phases of his life, is organising a lunch inspired by the book, in association with Woolworths’ TASTE magazine.

*   Lin Tung-Yuan of Café GABEE, ‘multi-award winner of the Taiwan Barista Championship, who is renowned for the delicacy and finesse of his coffee and coffee-inspired dishes’

*   Renata Coetzee, winner of a 2010 Gourmand World Cookbook Award for her book  ‘Koekemakranka: Khoi-Khoin Kultuurgoed en Kom-kuier-Kos’

*   Tammy Frazer, a perfumist (an odd link to a food conference!)

*   Wolfgang Koedel of Paulaner (a last minute addition, only announced on Twitter yesterday)

Running alongside the Conference are a number of events (oddly this programme has only just been finalised, a week before the Festival), which are free of charge, unless otherwise indicated below:

*   Spier vertical tasting

*  a SAB beer and food pairing led by Chef Pete Goffe-Wood of Kitchen Cowboys and Denis da Silva

*   a workshop by Eloise Alemany (R250)

*  a perfume workshop by Tammy Frazer (R350)

*   Tung-Yuan Lin barista workshop

The Toffie Festival, with a price tag of R 1710, also includes a Braai lunch, as well as a ‘secret home dinner’, breakfast and two Woolworths coffee vouchers.  The home dinners will be held on 3 September, and one will be allocated to dinner at the home of one of the following:

*   Cameron Munro from Superette

*   Gerhard Greyvenstein and Herman Lampen of Grey Lamp, a ‘pop-up’ supper club

*   Sumien Brink, editor of Woolworths’ TASTE magazine, and Cara Brink

*   Callie Maritz and Mari-Louis Guy of Cakebread boutique bakery

*   Alma Viviers, managing editor of VISI magazine and Kobus van der Merwe, chef/owner of Oep ve Koep in Paternoster

*   Tina Bester of Queen of Tarts

*   Cleon and Kate Romano of Maria’s Greek Café/Restaurant

*   Philip and Lisa Key of African Relish

*   Laureen Rossouw, editor of ELLE Decoration

*   Will Hobson of fieldoffice, a sandwich-maker

*   Aletta Lintveld, food editor of Weg magazine

*   Fabio and Luan Lauro of House of Pasta

*   Brendon and Suzette Bell-Roberts of art south africa magazine.

Toffie Food Festival and Conference delegates receive a copy of Cape Town ‘MENU’, an interesting book of restaurants and recipes, and is a listing of the Toffie Festival’s ‘guide of the best meals in Cape Town’. Included, for example, is:

*   Greek and African food: recommending Maria’s, and Bebe Rose

*   Portuguese and Italian food: recommending The Villa Tavern, Giovanni’s, Pizzeria Napoletana, House of Pasta, Hildebrand Restaurant, Chop, Fork Tapa, Meloncino, and Il Cappero.

*   Asian food: recommending Hesheng Chinese Takeaway, Chef Pon’s, Yindee’s, Mr Chan Chinese Restaurant, and Takumi

*   Cakes and desserts, recommending C’est La Vie, Keenwä, Arno Arpin, Biesmiellah, Queen of Tarts, Cassis Paris, Bird’s Boutique Café (may no longer be relevant with new chef opening with new menu on 1 September), Cakebread, Giovanni’s, Willoughby’s, fieldoffice, Lindt Chocolate Studio, San Julian, and Il Cappero.

Worrying is the low key marketing of the event, which is not yet sold out, and that speakers are still being added to the programme.  The printed programme delivered on Friday looks different to the one on the website, and some international speakers seem to have fallen off the programme. There appears to be no theme to the Conference, and it looks like a randomly thrown together collection of speakers.  Surprising is that no local foodies are on the programme, be they food bloggers or journalists.

POSTCRIPT: The Toffie Food Festival was all about over-promise and under-delivery.  Read our report.

Toffie Food Festival and Conference, City Hall, 3 – 4 September. www.toffie.co.za

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter:@WhaleCottage