Best of South African Eats

Our regular readers may have noticed we abstained from our regular “Best Of” foodie posts during our time in India. As we mentioned in our India Travel Tips, unless you are lucky enough to be invited over to a family’s home for a home-cooked meal, well … as our Moms always told us, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

Once in Africa, we scarfed down the campsite dinners on our overlanding trip from Victoria Falls to Cape Town. It was the type of simple, home-cooked comfort food we had been craving after many months on the road. But we typically ate these in the dark around a campfire, so sorry, I don’t have any pictures.

South Africa brought with it an interesting assortment of good eats. Ethnic Cape cuisine — an exotic mixture of the many cultures that have passed around the Cape of Good Hope — fresh seafood, even fine French dining at its many wineries. Here are a few of our favorites.

Traditional South African Foods

We enjoyed bobotie, a casserole of spiced ground meat and sweet dried fruit with an egg-based topping.

Here’s a fun fact from its Wikipedia page:

Bobotie was selected by 2008 Masters golf champion and South African native Trevor Immelman as the featured menu item for Augusta National’s annual “Champions Dinner” in April 2009. Each year, the reigning champion at The Masters golf tournament, played every year in Augusta, Georgia, hosts the gathering and tends to create a menu featuring delicacies from his home region.

We tried biltong — salty dried game meats, similar to jerkey; bunny chow — curries stuffed into hollowed out bread loaves; potjiekos — a meat and vegetable stew cooked over a fire in a three legged cast iron pot; all sorts of grilled meats cooked on the braii; and boerewors — seasoned sausages that were always part of breakfast spreads. We also drank loads of rooibos — Afrikaans for “Red Bush” — tea. It’s bright red and naturally a bit sweet and caffeine free. We even saw coffee shops using finely ground rooibos to make naturally caffeine-free espresso-style drinks.

Game Meats

We loved springbok, which we had raw at a French restaurant (see below), and in burgers on the braii at our beach place in Wilderness. Oryx was another favorite. We had it in filet form cooked to a perfect medium-rare. It reminded me of the grass-fed venison they serve at 4th and Swift, one of my favorite Atlanta restaurants. We also loved ostrich — a red meat with a fat content less than chicken or turkey. Warthog ribs tasted like cured bacon, but crocodile ribs were chewy and tough.

Dinner at La Colombe

For Skyler’s 29th birthday, we treated ourselves to dinner at La Colombe, the restaurant at the Constantia Uitsig winery about half an hour outside of Cape Town. We had a cozy table next to the fireplace, and enjoyed a multi-course meal paired with the estate’s wines. The mains were ho-hum, but we really liked one of our starter courses, smoked springbok tataki with duck liver puree, red wine marinated quail egg, red wine shallots, hibiscus jellies (these were really good!), sultana puree, and pickled mushrooms.

The dessert offering was something with bananas. Instead, we opted for the plate of South African cheeses. As our waiter, who typically droned on about each course in painstaking detail, said as he dropped off dessert, “cheese and port, ’nuff said.”

Seafood in Knysna

I usually don’t like ordering seafood at restaurants. All too often I’m disappointed by fish that’s not fresh, over-cooked, and really expensive. Growing up in Florida, we always found the best seafood at simple places near the water with access to the freshest seafood — or better yet, the fish fries we each had at home after our Grandpas came home from a day of fishing.

So, we followed our instincts to Freshline Fisheries in Knysna. It’s a little fish market that just recently started cooking fish for their customers at their factory shop on the docks. They put out some picnic tables, prepped a few side dishes, and have become a hot spot for the locals. It’s a no-frills, BYOB atmosphere with seriously delicious seafood. We both ordered fried hake with buttery shrimp and sides of fries, salad and cole slaw. After wolfing them down, we agreed this might have been our favorite meal in South Africa.

Knysna is also home to the best oysters I’ve had outside of Normandy — huge, plump, briny and buttery. In fact, we had just missed their annual oyster festival a few weeks earlier.

Timberlake Organic Village

Timberlake Organic Village is a collection of artisan food shops along the N2 in Wilderness. The restaurant there, Zucchini, is really great. Most of their vegetables are sourced from their own gardens and their meats are naturally raised on local farms. Here is Skyler’s roasted veggie sandwich with sweet potato fries. We ate here twice during our time in Wilderness (and it’s right off the N2, if you are just driving by).

Coffee and Sweets at Ile de Pain

As Skyler mentioned in our post about Knysna, Ile de Pain is a top-notch French style bakery on the slightly-too-perfect Thesen Island (it felt a little Truman Show-esque). Their sweets and coffee are worth a stop on their own. We also had breakfast here one morning — perfectly runny scrambled eggs with their Parisian quality baguettes. Here’s a chocolate tart we really liked:

And a perfectly executed Cortado:

Lunch at Jordan Winery

Our flight out of South Africa to Istanbul wasn’t until the evening, and earlier in the week we had spotted an excellent winter lunch deal at the restaurant at the Jordan Winery in Stellenbosch. Four courses and two glasses of wine for $27! So before dropping off the rental car, we enjoyed this incredible lunch.

Before our first course they brought out this bread plate where the spreads were the stars: olive tapenade, garlic aioli, and salty spicy butter.

Cauliflower soup with crispy, spicy duck. Cauliflower soup normally sounds boring, but this had an INTENSE flavor and a nice textural contrast with the crispy duck. It was in a funky fish bowl, otherwise I would have licked it clean.

Fried fish with lemon and fennel risotto and nasturtium (a type of watercress) cream and leaves of nasturtium.

Our favorite course — a slow braised springbok shank wrapped around smoked bone marrow (“God’s butter”) stuffed into a bone-shaped potato, and roasted winter veg. O. M. G.

For dessert — chocolate torte, rhubarb puree, poached rhubarb, and ice cream over a red wine poached pear.

And did I mention we had an incredible view? I’d definitely recommend coming here for lunch or an early dinner, so you don’t miss this!

What a great meal and a perfect way to end our trip to South Africa.