Haute Cabrière
* * *
Appetising, fresh and flavourful food
Lambrechts Road, R45 (Franschhoek Pass), Franschhoek
021 876 3688
Closed Monday. Open for lunch only 12-3pm Tuesday to Sunday; lunch and dinner 12am-9pm Friday & Saturday. Terrace menu available from Tuesday to Saturday from 3pm-5-30pm during the summer season.
restaurant@cabriere.co.za
www.cabriere.co.za
GPS: 33° 55' S / 19° 8' E
JOS BAKER
MOST wine farms open a restaurant as an added attraction. Then engage a top-ranking chef for added allure. Haute Cabrière has bucked this trend. In the basic belief that all restaurants on wine farms have the underlying agenda of increasing wine sales, they’ve come into the open and admitted that their restaurant is a PR tool.
I love their honesty in stating that their prime focus is on what’s in the bottle – which can’t be altered. So their restaurant menus revolve round this fixed factor.
As their emphasis is on simple, tasty and farm-fresh food, they’ve appointed a “farmboy” as chef. Dennis Strydom hails from Joubertina in the deciduous-rich Eastern Cape – and still finds it hard to buy fruit, when as “Dennis the Menace” he simply raided the neighbours’ trees. He trained at the historic Queen’s Hotel in Oudtshoorn before cheffing at boutique hotels and five-star lodges across the Garden Route and Eastern Cape.
But when he thinks food, his mind goes straight to his grandmother’s home on the family farm in the Langkloof. “Her cooking was all about delicious, honest food” says a nostalgic Dennis, whose aim at Cabrière is to take the essence of home-style, no-gimmick cooking and elevate it to restaurant level. Central to his mission to make the menu “consistent, generous and worth returning for”, is a simple food philosophy: “Everything on a plate needs to be there for a reason – to add flavour to the dish.”
A good team player rather than super-star, he’s settled happily into the kitchen. And most importantly, he understands the philosophy of the cellar, working closely with cellarmaster Takuan von Arnim in wine-pairing. As Denis enjoys wine, but has no connoisseur pretensions, he’s not hampered by pre-conceived ideas on flavour-matching.
His relaxed bistro-style food is presented in three menus. The imaginative “marriage of food and wine” inspired by Haute Cabrière Pinot Noir classics, is a three- or six-course tasting menu, the upscale option for those seeking a relaxed match-making culinary journey.
The à la carte offers a fresh selection of appetizers and mainstream treats like daily fresh pasta; coconut vegetable curry; coq au vin (in white wine) and a best-selling sirloin steak, topped with brandy and peppercorn cream. Rounded off by indulgent desserts chalked on a board.
The terrace menu is geared for late lunchers or travelling tasters who have been so busy tasting at various venues, that the kitchens have closed before they’ve eaten. Here the choice revolves round hearty platters geared for two, generous salads and a gourmet beef burger. (I may be mistaken, but I think this is the first time a burger has appeared on a Cabrière menu.)
Struggling to decipher the tasting menu in a dark of corner of the restaurant (which is excavated into the mountainside, overlooking the maturation cellar) I complained – to be assured that the lighting was under review. Meanwhile, ask for a table at the window; under the chandeliers or at a table on the terrace with its panoramic view.
We leapfrogged between menus, sampling a taste of each. My Cordon Bleu companion lauded a sip of the unwooded Pinot Noir as the perfect companion to the refreshing tomato gazpacho, topped with a hardonnay and basil sorbet and drizzled with parsley oil. Fortunately she tasted it first: chilli is one of Dennis’s top-ranking spices.
She then crossed to the à la carte, ordering apricot and cumin-glazed pork belly and couscous with watercress, mint, apple, cucumber and orange. A fruity, flavour-rich marriage, this lived up to our smiling waiter’s recommendation: it’s his favourite dish.
Warned to watch for chilli, I stayed with the temptations of the tasting menu. My generous slices of local Franschhoek smoked trout, accented with orange, a grilled and roasted beetroot duo and dill cottage cheese, was paired with one of my favourite MCCs: the charmingly seductive Pierre Jourdan Belle Rose. To my palate, a marriage made in heaven, though I had one quibble. Plating is bistro-style simple rather than overdressed, but generosity overcame design – the zingingly fresh ingredients deserved more space to showcase their attractions.
Whether on a blackboard or printed menu, desserts are decadent. Fall for the blue cheese and fig ice-cream, cracker crumble, black pepper tuille, candied fig glaze and toasted pecans (paired with Pierre Jourdan Ratafia) or succumb to a blackboard treat of dark chocolate and salted caramel tart with a white chocolate mousse, caramel popcorn and macerated berries, garnished with mint gel and plated with popcorn ice cream.
l The Tasting Menu offers two options, 3 courses or 6 courses including a glass of the recommended wine with each course in both options. The à la carte appetisers from R65; mains from R65; desserts from R80.