I am loath to write about any survey or compilation by TripAdvisor, but the pride of seeing Cape Town Restaurant The Test Kitchen in its list of 25 Best Fine Dining Restaurants in the World makes it worth acknowledging.
Announced today, TripAdvisor does not explain how the Best 25 Fine Dining Restaurants were Continue reading →
A number of Franschhoek’s top chefs will pair their delectable dishes with the wines of the local wine estates at ‘Cook Franschhoek’, running from 13 – 15 June, sharing their special cooking tips, reflecting the food trend of getting back to basics.
Spread around the wine estates and restaurants of Franschhoek, the participating chefs will allow workshop participants into their domains, and share their cooking secrets, while the winemakers will guide the attendees on choosing the most suitable wines to pair with each dish made. At the end of each workshop, the dishes cooked and the wines paired will be available to taste. It also allows one to interact with the chefs and winemakers in small groups, and to ask more specific questions.
The participating Franschhoek chefs subscroibe to the cooking basics, such as ‘snout-to-tail’ food usage, meaning that every piece of an animal such as a pig is used (such as witnessed on MasterChef SA Season 2 when Chef Chris Erasmus of Pierneef à La Motte cooked a pig’s head to make a terrine); sourcing ingredients fresh from the farm to the table, within close proximity to the restaurants; smoking meats, charcuterie being the speciality of Chef Neil Jewell of Bread & Wine; cooking over a fire, including a rotisserie, a Green Egg, and Weber; and Nordic cooking techniques of pickling, fermenting, and preserving. Continue reading →
Carlo Cracca. Antonio Carluccio. Gennaro Contaldo. Katy Ashworth. Emma Dean. Vichit Mukura. These are the ‘top international chefs’ Cape Town food lovers are being exposed to at the Good Food & Wine Show at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, augmented with a handful of light-weight (with the exception of Chef David Higgs) mainly TV cooking program local cooks! As Cape Town is the centre of gourmet gastronomy, surely exhibition organisers Fiera Milano could have done better?
Christine Cashmore has organised the Good Food & Wine Show for years, and sold her company to Fiera Milano last year. She is certainly still involved, as I saw her at the show yesterday. She is tough to deal with, changing PR companies every year! Every year the criticism about the Show has grown, the big food producers no longer bothering to participate, and sample their products. The emphasis this year was clearly TV cooking shows, and the invited chefs (mainly) had a link to a TV program, in cooking at the Celebrity Chefs Theatre (how did Kamini Pather slip in here, as controversial winner of MasterChef Season 2?), the kykNET Kook Teater, the Spar Food Theatre, and the Selati Sweet Treats Theatre. Continue reading →
One can commend Franschhoek Wine Valley tourism for constantly finding new ways to attract visitors to its gourmet food and wine village. Now it has launched the Franschhoek Artisan Food Route, attracting attention to the diversity of 21 hand-made high quality small quantity food producers in the valley, with more to be added.
The little A5 Franschhoek Wine Valley leaflet about the Franschhoek Artisan Food Route does not do justice to the quality of the food artisans on the Route, and one wonders why they skimped to keep the map so small, when the Wine and Restaurant map is A3 in size! The result is that the detail provided is minimal, just three lines per food artisan, with the exception of La Motte’s entry. The Franschhoek Artisan Food Route will be launched to the media later this week. Many of the food artisans on the Route have operated in the valley for years. Not all the listed artisanal outlets seem true to the definition provided in the Route map: ‘Artisan producers understand and respect the raw materials with which they work. They know where these materials come from and what is particularly good about them’! A number of artisanal producers have been left off the list, Continue reading →