Dear Sarah
We are extremely proud to have you living in your newly adopted home city Cape Town, and that you are such a fantastic tourism ambassador for our country in general, and for Cape Town in particular. You put Cape Town on the world tourist map with your article earlier this year in the New York Times about Cape Town being the number one ’52 places to go in 2014′, the best free publicity our city has ever had.
I was therefore shocked to see your article about ‘Top Chefs in Cape Town’ in Travel + Leisure, and the choices you made in selecting what you have listed as the top five chefs in Cape Town: Luke Dale-Roberts of The Test Kitchen, Peter Tempelhoff of The Greenhouse, Reuben Robertsons Riffel of Reuben’s x 4 (in Franschhoek, Cape Town, Robertson, and Paternoster) plus Racine, Bruce Robertson of The Flagship, and Franck Dangereux of The Food Barn, in that order. You did not define your guidelines for selecting the five chefs, nor did you appear to use the same criteria in selecting the chefs that are on your list – the justification for inclusion appears more anecdotal and random. Equally, I am surprised about the chefs you excluded from the list!
You seem to praise Chef Franck for his ‘foreign pedigree, but why single him out when Chefs Luke and Peter also have foreign roots? Does that make them better chefs? All of the chefs on your list have worked overseas, so they deserve equal mention in this regard. You ‘warn’ Travel + Leisure readers to ‘watch out for these five Cape Town chefs and memorize their names now – they’re poised to break through to the global stage any day now‘!
Let me comment on each of your Top Chef choices: Continue reading →
From number one in the New York Times ‘52 Places to go in 2014‘, Cape Town has fallen right off the list of ‘52 Places to go in 2015‘. In its place, Durban has made 7th on this prestigious list this year! Cape Town too has lost out to Los Angeles as the home for filming the German reality series ‘Der Bachelor’.
