Food, glorious food....

We are eating and drinking our way round the Cape. Daily Gordon pours over a borrowed Platter’s Wine Guide (thanks Julian) identifying which wines we should taste where and now he’s checking off how many of the country’s top restaurants we’ve eaten at so far. We’re unable to pass up the opportunity to buy very good wine at a fraction of what it would cost in Europe, so our hire car is bit like a cellar on wheels. I fear we are just going to have to drink the stuff before we leave at the end of the month. 

Serious business of wine guide perusal

A meal of note: in Paarl we had a superlative five course dinner, with wine to match each course, in a grand setting at Bosman’s Restaurant. Chandeliers, top notch service, rose petals on the table (it was Valentine’s Day) and a pianist playing tunes from the 1980s…..not everyone’s cup of tea, but we loved it. Most of our fellow diners were mature (that means older than us!) but we were focused on what was placed in front of us. I’m not ashamed to say I photographed some of the plates they were so visually stunning. We loved everything about Bosman’s.

Pre dinner bubbly on the terrace at Bosman's Restaurant

View of the mountains beyond Paarl from the terrace

The prettiest of cheese courses..wafer thin gorgonzola + fancy bits

By the end of our month’s holiday we might well have consumed our body weight in biltong. For those unfamiliar with this Southern African delicacy, it’s air dried meat. It bears no relation to American jerky (which I think looks and tastes like brown plastic) and Gordon and I never tire of eating it having been introduced to it during our upbringing in Zimbabwe. We like our biltong on the moist side with fat (it can be bought in varying degrees of dryness and leanness, a few choices of animal and often chilli flavoured) and as soon our current grease-marked paper bag looks less than half full, we restock. We tell ourselves that there are worse snack foods out there.

Biltong....delicious stuff

I can’t not mention yesterday’s lunch at Foliage in Franschhoek. Our table adjacent to the open kitchen was perfectly placed to see the swiftness with which the chefs created delectable plates of food. With the memory of Bosman’s feast still fresh in our minds (that meal being less than 24 hours earlier) we were unprepared for such a delicious lunch. Haute cuisine indeed. Photographic evidence submitted below! It goes without saying that we washed it down some exceptional wine. Sorry to harp on about food but we do love it so.

The kitchen at Foliage restaurant, Franschhoek

My lunch