Restaurants

Gewurztraminer Meets Banana

August 4, 2010

Often, I think, too much is made of food and wine pairings. Achieving the perfect complement between the flavours of the wine and food (in the midst of myriad subjective factors) is almost impossible, and threatens to distract from the enjoyment of either the food or the wine. Having said that, wine dinners can be [...]

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Vaudeville’s July Menu

June 30, 2010

It is sensible, when feeding many people off a set menu that offers only three main course options (meat, fish or vegetarian), to stick to the safe, middle-of-the-road options. Any menu items that deviate from the broadest base of acceptance run the risk of creating problems due to the limited number of diners that would [...]

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Cape Town’s hottest new (old) address

June 19, 2010

One of my favourite parts of the Cape Town city centre is the top of Adderley Street, where Wale Street joins from the right. If one continues up Wale it cuts right across the city (parallel to what would have been coastline), ending up in the Bo-Kaap, just below the point where the Noon Gun [...]

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A Night of Vaudevillian Pleasure

May 30, 2010

Before Vaudeville opened, one of the management team was doing a quick mental calculation of the number of people involved in making each evening’s performance happen. I seem to recall a tally in the vicinity of 60 or 70, covering everything from performers to kitchen staff and waiters. As I have so indulgently reported, my [...]

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Vaudeville’s June Menu

May 18, 2010

It’s hard to believe that more than five months have whizzed by since the opening of Vaudeville. This equates to the service of nearly 25 000 meals, a rather startling realisation (more startling, perhaps, is how long it took me to get there as a guest. Read about my evening here). The total has been [...]

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Vaudeville’s May Menu

April 24, 2010

We have an delicious new line-up for the new Vaudeville menu, which runs until the end of May. Based upon the track record to date, the overwhelming favourite is going to be the meat option. We really can’t blame diners for following the herd on this one. Namibian free-range beef is one of the prize [...]

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The Ghosts of Meals Past

April 1, 2010

I’ve been mulling my Vaudeville kitchen experiences for quite a while, trying to reach a point of semi-objectively drawing some conclusions. During ‘service’, kitchens can be very stressful places. There’s enough on one’s mind getting the food on the menu out, without also having to deal with last-minute likes, dislikes, intolerances or allergies. When there [...]

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Angelic Red Snapper

January 12, 2010

I am usually loath to describe something as “the best” experience ever. Speed or distance travelled, weight and other such things can easily be supported by empirical measurement, but experiences are too subjective. Similarly, there is no such thing as “the best” wine, because scoring of wine is inherently flawed. Having said all of that, [...]

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Jean-Georges in da house

October 30, 2009

Jean-Georges Vongerichten was the subject of a recent Fortune magazine article, prompted by the writer’s apparent fascination at his attempt to “create an haute cuisine chain with the reach of McDonald’s”. All of this assumes the traditional model, of the master chef plying his trade in one kitchen only, and discounts the possibility that his [...]

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In Daniel’s Den

October 25, 2009

Henry David Thoreau “went to the woods”, he said, “to suck the marrow out of life”. While he was describing a more bucolic environment, getting the most out of three days and four nights in New York does require a similar level of gusto in grasping hold of each waking moment. In our case, that [...]

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