Tag Archives: Sunday Times Food Weekly

Peninsula All-Suite Hotel Wine & Dine interesting pairing with Steenberg wines!

Peninsula Steenberg John Loubser Whale Cottage PorfolioOn Thursday evening I was invited by Communication Services Africa (CSA) to attend The Peninsula All-Suite Hotel monthly Wine & Dine at its Sunset Restaurant, paired with Steenberg Wines, both clients of the PR consultancy.  We had a fun evening, with a lot of banter from both the host Chris Godenir and Steenberg General Manager and Cellar Master John Loubser.

Chris Godenir has been at Three Cities for a number of years, and has a special relationship with his staff at The Peninsula All-Suite Hotel, not losing his cool easily.  One has to get used to his sense of humour, which he surrounds himself with continuously, making one unsure whether he says something in jest or is serious.   Poor John and I both were on the receiving end of Chris’ jibes, and I decided to take the positive out of his comments, which in my case showed that he reads my blog!

Chris announced that the Wine & Dine was the first opportunity for their new chef Hajierah Hamit to cook for a special group, the dinner being sold out. I sat next to Chris’ vivacious wife Alison, and she told me interesting stories about integration in the workplace, the challenge no longer between different cultural groups, but rather between age groups, quoting generation Y and X behaviours in the workplace, and how these can cause conflict.  She is a consultant smoothing over such age related conflict in the workplace.  At the media table too were Joanne and Patrick Gibson (Joanne writes for the Sunday Times Food Weekly about wine), Cayleigh Bright of Glamour Online and her friend Will, and Megan Drury from CSA. Chris introduced John, the most creative interpretation of a CV John has probably had to endure, but it raised many laughs, and Continue reading →

WhaleTales Tourism, Food, and Wine news headlines: 9 September

WhaleTalesTourism, Food, and Wine news headlines

*   The MyCiTi Bus is to start rolling in the City Bowl, Sea Point, Century City, Duinefontein, and Melkbos on 2 November Brett Herron, the City of Cape Town’s Mayoral Committee Member for Transport,  has announced via Twitter.  The start date for Camps Bay is 30 November, more than a year behind schedule.

*   The petrol attendant strike commences today, originally forecast for last week.

*   SA Breweries has launched an advertising campaign, in the form of a self-produced advertorial, in the Sunday Times Food Weekly, encouraging beer to be paired with food as the beer’s flavour released in the malting process is similar to that in cooked food, it claims in rather technical terminology!   Food and beer pairing tips are provided, with a poor photograph showing an unappetizing looking dish with a small part of a Castle Milk Stout label:  flavours must be compatible, strengths must match, ale can pair with what red wine pairs with and lager with white wine pairings, and the greater the bitterness and the higher alcohol content, the heavier the dish should be.

*   Excellent feedback was received from German wine writer Mario Scheuermann Continue reading →

Cookbook writers ‘Cooking up a storm’ at the Franschhoek Literary Festival!

Yesterday was the first day of the 2013 Franschhoek Literary Festival, and was an action-packed day with good attendance.  ‘Cooking up a storm‘ was the only food-related session of the Festival, and was chaired by Taste Food editor and Eat Out editor Abigail Donnelly (left), with a panel of ‘Scrumptious’ writer Jane-Anne Hobbs-Rayner (second from right), ‘Karoo Kitchen”s Sydda Essop (second on left), and Hilary Biller (right), editor of the Sunday Times Food Weekly insert, and of a book with a collection of its recipes.  The panelists were unanimous in heaping praise on ‘Karoo Kitchen’.

Sydda Essop grew up in the Great Karoo, and used to travel with her father to farmworkers in the region, as his job was to fight for their rights. This allowed her to enter the Continue reading →

MasterChef SA Judge Benny Masekwameng sparks in the kitchen! ‘Face of Food’ at Tsogo Sun!

The highlight of my week two weeks ago was being able to sit down with Chef Benny Masekwameng, one of the three MasterChef SA judges, and Tsogo Sun Executive Chef.  He is incredibly nice, and overwhelmed about how his own career and life has changed since participating in MasterChef SA, much like that of the Finalists.

Chef Benny was in Cape Town for the official launch of the Southern Sun rebranding to Tsogo Sun, which was held at The Cullinan hotel. Previously Executive Chef of the MondoVino restaurant at Montecasino in Johannesburg, Chef Benny has been promoted to Executive Chef, responsible for promoting all the restaurants at the Tsogo Sun’s 95 hotels and 15 casinos around the country.   Tsogo means ‘rising’ in Tswana, Chef Benny told me.  Applying his MasterChef SA judging skills, Chef Benny challenged the Cape Town guests to participate in an ingredient test, identifying the 13 ingredients of the curry he had prepared.

I asked Chef Benny about the MasterChef SA prize offered of running the MondoVino restaurant at Montecasino, taking over his previous job.  The MasterChef SA winner will receive three month’s training in people and financial support he said, and his/her hand will be held by a mentor as well as by Chef Benny.  He said that the MasterChef SA reality TV show builds up the Finalists in what they learn, giving the winner a ‘crash course’ in running a restaurant kitchen, including ingredient pairing, budgeting, and food and wine pairing.

Chef Benny’s role in MasterChef SA was to support the contestants, many having made significant sacrifices to participate in the show. He said that he feels privileged to have been part of their journey, it mirroring his own journey of humble beginnings, and giving up many things to pursue his dream to become a chef.  He grew up in Alexandra township in Johannesburg, and was strongly influenced by his mother. She started her own business, after taking a cooking course, selling pap, stew, salad, as well as vetkoek, outside nearby factories. While his dream was to become an Electrical Engineer, it was a visit to Durban to visit his friends that led him to Technikon Natal, and he decided to study a 3-year Catering Management course in a city that gave him some space from home. On graduating he was appointed as a Trainee at the Hilton Hotel in Durban, where he worked for more than six years, promoted over this period.  The job took him overseas regularly, to promote local food at events held at South African embassies, and it was these events that taught him ‘showmanship’, in interacting with the guests. He moved to the Elangeni Hotel, his first Southern Sun appointment, and he has stayed with the group since then, moving back to Johannesburg as Executive Sous Chef at the OR Thambo Southern Sun.  The promotion to Executive Chef at MondoVino restaurant happened 16 months ago, and since the completion of Season 1 of MasterChef SA he is in charge of promoting all the Tsogo Sun restaurants, being its ‘face of food’.

MondoVino restaurant is Italian-themed, but with an African influence, also serving bobotie, oxtail, pap and wors, chakalaka, and its design is ‘modern, young, and hip’.   It is ‘casual dining‘, and offers ‘3 – 4 star service‘, he said.  It has shifted in its focus on being family-orientated, with a special menu for the children.

M-Net has a five-year licence for MasterChef SA, and there is talk of a Season 2. Chef Benny said it is a bonus for him that Tsogo Sun is a sponsor. His own kitchen staff is watching MasterChef SA, and it gives them hope that they too can develop as he has done, and they are proud to work with him.  For him it has been special to meet all the young aspirant chefs, and to inspire them.  He is keeping up to date with many of them, and he is delighted about the encouraging messages he is receiving, and the promotion and growth it has given him personally, much as the MasterChef SA Finalists have grown and succeeded too.  Just after MasterChef SA started airing, his first baby daughter Dimakatso was born, named after his mother. We laughed about his ‘TV flirt’ with Lungi Nhlanhla, about whom he says that ‘she knows how to combine her flavours’, and that ‘she can cook’.  With fellow Finalists Deena Naidoo and Manisha Naidu, Lungi knows her flavours. Yet, he said, all eighteen the Finalists had the potential of getting to the top.

Fellow judge and Chef Andrew Atkinson is a natural ‘clown‘, he said, always making jokes on set, and these kept the energy flowing. But, jokes aside, he knows his food.  Chef Pete Goffe-Wood was full of jokes too, but he was ‘tough on camera, telling it like it is‘. He praised his fellow MasterChef SA judges, who had more cooking experience than he does, but always treated him as an equal and made him feel part of the judging team, even though Chefs Andrew and Pete had worked together at the Beverly Hills hotel many years ago.  He was inspired by them, and are two of our country’s best, he added.  He can exchange information with them now, and pick up the phone to them, being ‘brothers’ now!  He assured me that there were no production influences in the judging of the dishes and elimination of the Finalists, and confirmed that the Finalists eliminated simply were those that made the most mistakes in a particular challenge.

To tie in with its sponsorship of MasterChef SA as a ‘Hospitality Host’, and Chef Benny’s involvement in the show as a judge, Tsogo Sun has launched Wednesday Night Dinners, a ‘themed dish of the week inspired by the show, and you be the judge’! The hotel group is advertising this in the Sunday Times Food Weekly.

Chef Benny has grown as much as his Finalists on MasterChef SA have, and he said that initially it was ‘terrifying’ to be on TV, surrounded by nine cameras, but now he is used to it, and he would love to do more of it, having discovered a new side of himself. Meeting with Chef Benny for about an hour reinforced what a nice person he is, the reason why he is so well-liked by the MasterChef SA TV viewers.

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