The Cape escape

Craving a gourmet getaway? As Cape Town moves up in the world, David Woodward tracks down the best places to eat, drink and stay in and around the Cape Town area

Capetonians like to lunch. When they’re not eating, they’re talking about eating, and when they’re not talking about eating, they’re at least thinking about it. Let a local know you’re a tourist and you might as well clear your schedule for a rambling appraisal of the city’s best and worst restaurants. What’s most striking is that even as Cape Town gentrifies, and the resulting property boom sweeps its way down Table Mountain, many of the city’s restaurants have managed to retain a folksy charm that belies the affluence of their clientele. The chefs may have sharpened up their menus but, despite a strengthening rand, prices are still unbelievably low and the service has retained a sense of humour.

La Perla is a Cape Town institution that dates back to the 1960s. Its waiters employ a serving style reminiscent of an age when the customer was almost incidental to the running of a restaurant, while the old-fashioned décor finds itself unintentionally back in vogue. Luckily, the food manages to steal all the attention. A main of beef sirloin tagliata, drizzled with truffle oil and stuffed with mozzarella and mushrooms, arrives nanoseconds after my bruschetta starter is whisked away. No matter: both are perfect. A request for an accompanying recommendation from the wine list is greeted with blank looks, and we appear to have no cutlery. But a slab of tuna is cooked and dressed so well that the service cracks are hidden. It’s faultless Italian cooking, delivered 5,000 miles from Rome.

Cape Town boasts an impressive number of competing gourmet hotspots. Down on the coast at Camps Bay, where locals settle down for sunset views a good three hours before the sun sinks into the Atlantic, the restaurants jostle for position along the palm-tree-lined boulevard. And unlike most of Europe, where the quality of view is in inverse relation to the quality of the food, here the chefs can all butterfly prawns with their eyes closed. Camps Bay is where the celebrities come to eat, but the service is quintessentially Cape Town. The Codfather, arguably the best for seafood, is delightfully laid-back. It’s also hilariously camp: tattooed waiters constantly bitch at each other, trading insults as they serve. “Now, he’s no good at all,” confides one with a wink.

Other gastronomic areas to look out for are Constantia, Kloofnek (which, if pronounced with the clipped vowels of a local, sounds like a loading shotgun) and even the newly developed Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. Although the latter is decidedly surf and turf in style, its gargantuan portions more than compensate. Cape Grace Hotel’s own restaurant, One.Waterfront, is a touch more stylish and has an excellent whiskey bar below, stocked with over 400 malts, blends and bourbons from around the world.

Cape Town’s growing status is attracting foreign nationals to the local hotel trade. Last year, the Portuguese former London banker Ariel Glownia established Alta Bay, a small boutique hotel overlooking Cape Bay. He completed a course at Central Saint Martins in London—“I was one of the only bankers carrying a portfolio into the City”—before emigrating to South Africa and designing Alta Bay himself from top to bottom. “The tourism industry is something the government wants to promote, so you can get grants for setting up a related business here,” he says. “It’s one of the easiest areas to get that support because they expect you will create jobs.”

Keith Stewart, the Zimbabwean chairman of the Pezula Resort Hotel & Spa, interrupted his retirement plans to set up a lavish complex in Knysna, a few hours’ scenic drive east of Cape Town. “I had the yacht, the Californian house, the Mallorcan villa, and I just got bored,” he explains. Pezula is something of an obsession for Stewart and his empire is expanding rapidly. The resort golf course is challenging enough without the added distraction of stunning views of the Indian Ocean on one side and Knysna Lagoon on the other. The spa offers a collection of radical—as well as unintentionally violent—massages, including everything from hot-stone pummelling to the Phumla, a powerful African drumbeat played out on your back.

Stewart is busy adding a cricket oval, tennis courts and a football field. Sven-Goran Eriksson has already looked into the suitability of the venue as a base for the England squad in preparation for the 2010 World Cup, while over on the Pezula private estate, sporting celebrities such as Nick Price and Roger Federer are busy building their holiday retreats. The word luxury doesn’t quite do the place justice.

Over in Franschhoek, about an hour east of Cape Town, the landscape is equally eye-catching. Row upon row of lush vineyards are framed by a rugged, purple-tinged mountain range and dotted with traditional whitewashed Cape Dutch buildings. It’s a fine backdrop for working your way through the wide range of Western Cape wines, many of which haven’t yet made their way over to the UK. The French settled here in the 17th century, lending not only their viticultural but also their culinary skills to the region. Locals now face the nightly challenge of selecting somewhere to eat from an enviable list of world-class restaurants. Somewhere near the top of that list is French Connection, if only because it succeeds in serving up reliable, unfussy French cuisine—a concept considered almost niche back in the UK.

Most of the vineyards offer tastings, from the more celebrated labels, such as Boschendal, to strong newcomers like Graham Beck, which makes a stylish Shiraz better suited to winter fireside drinking than the sun-splashed cafés of Franschhoek. A more summery red is on offer at the Grande Provence estate. It’s called Angel’s Tears, which obviously raises an eyebrow because the salesman immediately launches into a lengthy explanation.

“Legend has it…” he begins, and I drift off into a blurry trance, partly due to mid-afternoon boozing and partly because that’s my usual reaction when a New World wine salesman attempts to embellish a brand with a mythical tale. “The name was adopted when a pair of angels first discovered the grape from which the wine is made, and wept at how beautiful it tasted,” he concludes, admirably straight-faced. And then comes the punch line: the stuff sells for £3 a bottle. Enough to bring tears to anyone’s eyes.