Azure summer menu and Dornier's new chef
ESTATE agents will sing-song position, position, position which is never truer when one’s outlook is onto the sea or arrestingly beautiful mountains. Azure Restaurant at the 12 Apostle’s has such a view over the Atlantic that it is hard to remember that one is in a hotel just 20-minutes from Cape Town and not on an ocean liner on the deep blue. Like its name suggests, Azure is blue. Not in sad way like people who mope but like those who sing bada bi, bada bum at the views and long-time chef’s Roberto De Carvahlo’s cuisine.
There are twelve new items on the menu which we previewed as a three-course plated meal with four samplings per plate. Starter stand-outs included the Crayfish Bisque, rich and flavourful with wild fennel, diced crayfish, white wine and brandy enriched by double cream and served with prawn and sesame ginger toasts. The gravlax of Scandinavian salmon was good and attractively served with poached quail’s egg.
Although I really enjoyed the Cape Malay chicken curry very much, the fish of the day made the biggest impression on me with its perfectly cooked chunky prawn, tomato and smoked Spanish paprika sauce. The accompanying spinach and ricotta Panzarotti crescent is like eating a silk pocket of flavour. Azure is one of the few restaurants (too few to my mind) that make cooking with fynbos a focus. The Buchu Crème Brûlée is example of how to create a perfectly delicious and uniquely Cape dish.
Azure at 12 Apostles Hotel. 021-437-9000.
The view of the mountains from Dornier wine estate on the Blaauwklippen, Stellenbosch road is achingly beautiful and I’m pleased to say the food matches perfectly.
I have always enjoyed what I’ve eaten at
Dornier’s Bodega restaurant but after feasting with new chef Naas Pienaar (whom I stupidly called Morne throughout the meal) the restaurant could be in line for culinary awards.
His emphasis is on sourcing farm-fresh ingredients and treating them respectfully with slow cooking that plays pied-piper with flavours drawing them out from the flesh’s deepest recesses.
The lamb shoulder, for example is cooked for many hours in a wood-fed oven that it offers up its own scents on a garlic magic carpet. The accompanying carrots and potatoes look and taste beautiful, still glistening from being cooked in duck fat. Madagascan pepper steak is a winner while catch of the day is dressed with vanilla and lime butter reduction.
Chef Naas, it seems, has affairs with ingredients. When we dined he’d added fresh porcini to many dishes. Unlike some restaurants where they work the same few ingredients into as many dishes as possible, here, buoyed by his culinary abundance, it reads as generous rather than money saving.
He has an impressive CV with Londolozi and three of Cape Town’s five star hotel kitchen’s listed. The proof as always is in the eating and at Bodega you can do so with pleasure and confidence.
Be sure to book first. I noticed at least five groups being turned away who arrived without reservations.
Bodega at Dornier. 021-880-0557
[31-Oct-08]
Brian Berkman
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