Humble Riches: Richter and Mabaso show us what brotherly cooking is all about

Virtually every part of the lamb went into this dish in one way or another. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

By Tony Jackman

16 Aug 2024

Here’s a meeting of minds, palates and cultures, all in one room. This is a ‘collab’, that thing that high-ranking chefs have taken to doing. You trek across the country to dine at the restaurant of a peer, then invite them back to yours. In Jozi, this was a collab of note.

We’re in Johannesburg, so one of these chefs is out of place. He is Johannes Richter of Durban’s lauded The LivingRoom at Summerhill. His host, and now friend and collaborator, is chef Wandile Mabaso of Les Créatifs in Sandton. I can’t help thinking, pulling up outside in an uber, what chef Richter must have thought when he first pulled up here a few days ago to prepare for this meeting of palates. From the parking lot, surrounded by bland neon-sign businesses, there’s no sign of the restaurant at all. It’s upstairs, at the end of a passage. But it’s what happens inside that counts.

Compare this with Summerhill, which couldn’t be more different. A grand thatched homestead with, like this, masses of space between tables, and interior and al fresco dining options. Both of these chefs are more interested in spoiling a few people with fabulous food than packing them in and ringing the till. And both have humble roots, in KwaZulu-Natal (Richter) and Soweto, but of KZN ancestry (Mabaso). The milieu they both operate in – very fine city restaurants – belies their mutual humility and unassuming roots. Their joint menu, aptly, is titled Humble Riches.

But they are not really all that far removed: Wandile does have KwaZulu-Natal roots, even though he was Soweto-raised. He is a Zulu (on his father’s side), and a Sowetan by birth, and a proud Johannesburger. He calls his city “the New York of Africa”, and he means it. He sees its future, and its future is bright and towering. How refreshing to stand alongside such vision, such optimism, in this nation of hardened cynics. Maybe they should invite him to be an ambassador for the city.

Jo is here with Jo, of course. Jo(hannes) and Jo(hanna) Richter. JoJo. Jo is German-born, Durban-raised; Jo, whom he met in Europe, is Austrian. He cooks, she’s a sommelier not to be underestimated. They have become among the darlings of the South African chefs scene in the past three years.

Johanna Richter, left, with Johannes Richter and, right, Wandile Mabaso. In the right-hand photo, Johannes is plating up his chicken while Wandile, rear, eats a bit of it. Johanna seems amused. (Photos: Tony Jackman)

This is the media lunch, with paying guests set to arrive that evening and again the following day. It’s great fun for me, stuck as I am in the Karoo sticks, to rub shoulders for a change with Johannesburg food writing colleagues. I hear a familiar voice and, you know that moment when you think, I know that voice, that’s… Tamsin! What a delight, Tamsin Snyman who braved so much heartache in the first years of the century, first her mom Lannice gone, just months later her dad Mike, and then her husband after a lengthy, horrible battle with cancer. And how she has steered the ship her mother first launched, for all these years, flying the flag for South Africa in world culinary circles. Respect, Tam.

This is my second time at Mabaso’s stylish little restaurant. Tamsin spots the obvious factor immediately: that despite its relatively small scale, there is plenty of space to move around, and an odd feeling of spaciousness. Normally, tables are placed well apart, and also unusually, below your feet is a magnificent pale gold Persian rug. Not often found in a fancy restaurant where drips and splashes of food will inevitably find their way to the floor.

This time, however, Les Créatifs has just one table, right down the centre of the room. At the far end is the tiniest kitchen, surely, of any South African restaurant of this calibre. Your home kitchen is most probably larger. On my first visit there a year earlier, Wandile had ushered me into this small but hallowed space, pulling out elegant drawers below spotless counters to show pristine crockery and fridges full of neatly ordered ingredients.

Wandile and Johannes are… well, they’re not bustling about this kitchen. They’re strangely calm, almost still. A glance here and there, a nod or quiet word to a kitchen crew member. And this is a striking thing that these two chefs have in common. They give the impression of being stress-free, and surely this makes its way to their plates? Unquestionably.

And finesse. That’s the next thing these two share. And restraint. And a love for the earth and what grows in it. A nose for the aroma that first entices you closer to the plate, and the shared palate for the extraordinary sauce, the unexpected nuance, the surprise element.

At the pass, Jo is plating his chicken course, “Vanessa’s chicken”. At the corner of the counter, Wandile has a little bowl of strips of it. “This is my lunch,” he says softly. (He says everything softly.) He’s eating the most utterly delectable chicken. You taste chicken, and you taste salt on the ridiculously crispy skin. It is the bite of chicken you want and rarely get. The exact, proper, precise taste of chicken, regardless of what it’s been cooked with.

But this is well into the lunch; let’s step back.

The first course is Jo’s “greeting”. Msobo, aka nastergal (nightshade), which they forage in summer to preserve for use in winter. If you’ve eaten nastergal jam you’ll know that this is a deeply delicious berry. Nibble on an msobo macaron, then organic chicken liver parfait complemented by sweet potato chutney. Then, a “lolly” of baked and dehydrated sweet potato given a lacquer of homemade soy sauce that they’ve made from dhal and sorghum. KZN soy, then. There’s more sweet potato in a slug of soup with a touch of aji (mild chilli) pickling juice. It’s a bread course, too: their 70% rye (“the only German thing we do”), and purple sweet potato bread, “both aromatised with coriander and lime zest”. Aromatised is one of chef Jo’s chosen words. (The butter and salt were aromatised with coriander and lime.)

The men take turns to introduce courses, with Jo(hanna) interspersing with her fascinating wine pairings and insights. That “greeting” course was matched with 2023 Bruwer Vintners Methode Ancestrale, the guava course to come with Maanschijn Herbarium Cape White.

The second course is Jo’s, too: “Guava. Bitter greens. Acacia honey.” Guavas are a nostalgia point for Johannes. “I’m German; I grew up with guava rolls.” And here they are, on your plate: a nostalgic guava roll with a savoury twist filled with preserved guava with lightly salted unripe guava, garden indigenous bitter greens for “mustardy spiciness”. On the main plate, a guava salad with winter blossoms from their garden, predominantly baby sunrose, an indigenous ground cover, “to give a bit of savoury to a very fruit-centred dish”.

Johannes Richter’s nostalgic take on the guava rolls of his German youth. Guava salad, edible winter blossoms, and preserved guava on the side (right). (Photos: Tony Jackman)

It’s time for Wandile Mabaso’s first course. Hout Bay tuna. Sweetcorn. Maputo squid. Mussel. Sorghum. The man loves his seafood and he has a deft touch with it that suits his studied, thoughtful personality. Jo has paired it with an ocean-friendly Old Road Wine Co Grand Mère Sémillon, 2022.

Mabaso’s seafood course has deep roots in his years in Paris and New York City. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

The sea comes to the old City of Gold from New York City where chef Wandile worked with Alaskan crab and Maine lobster (“huge and cheaper than ours”) and sea urchins from Japan. But he also worked in Paris, and he brings that fisherman’s favourite of leftover fish scraps, bouillabaisse, that evolved over time to become the restaurant staple it is today. Not a bouillabaisse as such, but an idea of it: “Taking humble ingredients from the sea to make a dish, just the essence and the truth of what’s in there.” Mabaso is in love with seafood. He may, one day, become 90% pescatarian and 10% carnivore, because he loves his meat too, at least that much.

He seasoned his Hout Bay tuna (“we’re aware of who’s catching it”) with fermented Vietnamese fish sauce after scraping the white meat off the sinew closest to the belly “because it’s far more flavourful”. He caramelised sweet corn, added chipotle pepper from Mexico with its gentle heat and slight smokiness, and tobiko caviare, “that texture that keeps popping in your mouth, popping and popping”. Fresh coriander oil moistened the tuna.

The mussel element is a story in itself. They’re seared and then cooked in white wine. The lid is put on the pot and it steams gently for 90 minutes to two hours. The steam collects at the top and drips down, forming an exquisite stock.

“We get close to two litres of stock which we strain, remove the mussels, and use the stock as a jelly.” It’s flavoured with garlic, onion, herbs, Iranian saffron and turmeric, strained and set with agar agar. It’s not finished: it’s made into a shape that sits at the top of the tuna, with the stock used to create a sweet-and-sour glaze for the mussel that sits on top of the tuna. And tobiko caviare, and a mussel.

Surely nobody is going to do all that at home, so now you know why, if you like to be impressed by extraordinary food, you need to get to Mabaso’s restaurant. And we haven’t even mentioned the Maputo squid, the risotto of sorghum and samp, and the “broth from the head of the langoustine”.

Which brings us back to… Vanessa’s 60-days free range chicken. Jo is back at the end of the table and Wandile is back at the pass nibbling on what we’re all about to receive, amen. Back before we’d all heard of him, Jo used to go to the old Victoria Street Market in Durban to buy spices where a lovely spice lady gave him some lessons in mixing spices.

“This is basically a bit of an homage to that.”

From Vanessa, who supplies his birds, he brought us these examples of how good a chicken can and should be. For this course, it was marinated in sweet masala with yoghurt, crisped up on the skin, and served with fermented carrot pickle and carrot purée. A “French take on a butter chicken curry” was accompanied by a side sambal of chilli, grated carrot and lemon juice, between slices of carrot cooked in their own juice. All other chickens have been spoilt for me, let’s say that much.

‘Vanessa’s chicken’. Vanessa is Richter’s poultry supplier. The chicken is perfection itself. On the side: carrot pickle sambal. (Photos: Tony Jackman)

Finally, a collaboration on a plate: the sustainable lamb. Madumbe. Atchar. Pinotage jus. Served with a stupendous red wine: 2021 Weather Report Climes of Cabernet Franc. But that short description does no justice to what went on to this plate…

Take one Karoo lamb. Deconstruct it into its many parts. The trotters are cooked for 48 hours in lamb stock, bones and all. The gelatine this extracts will be the spine of the ultimate sauce that will be the flavour and texture you take home with you when all is said and done. The sauce you will ask for more of. The tripe of the same animal is cooked in the same liquid. The liver, heart, “every single part” (says Wandile) of the beast, including the tail, is chopped up and mixed with the chopped-up trotters and kidneys and mixed with the inhouse spice blend (coriander, fennel seeds, black peppercorns) to create a farce that is bound with wet bread.

The result is a true French classic technique, a “sausage roll”, if you like, of forcemeat wrapped in clingfilm and poached in a water bath. This is Mabaso’s French training. He learnt his craft under the wings of Alain Ducasse and Olivier Reginensi, which means he had both modern and old school training. He knows the old ways, and here it shows. And it’s another commonality: Richter has deep European training, too. (I’d be hard pressed to choose between the impact of this lamb reduction and the gobsmacking sauce he served me in Durban earlier this year.)

Virtually every part of the lamb went into this dish in one way or another. The two piped potato elements are regular potato and madumbe, a further collaboration. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

So you have a “sausage” of all the insides from head to tail, the rack loin, deboned, cooked sous vide for two hours at 61°, seasoned with a salt and pepper crust, then grilled for a slightly smoked braai flavour and served medium. (Interesting, that. It was perfect.)

That leaves the rib cage bones: they’re used for the ultimate reduction, “a very rich sauce to combat the offal” (they both decided), with pinotage added for a final South African flourish. And peppercorns and thyme and garlic and rosemary and reduced and strained, and then mixed with lamb stock that has been infused with the gelatine from the trotters. You surely don’t wonder why I asked for extra sauce.

I could have wept with joy or perhaps the desperate thought that I may never taste this sauce again, but the tears that Mabaso knew would come were yet to be released.

There’s a palate cleanser from Johannes of amathungula and galangal. Also called num num or Natal coastal plum, amathungula were foraged in his neighbourhood, turned into a sorbet, with galangal as a sauce, and also a piece of galangal which “almost has the same effect of eating ginger with sushi, which cleanses the palate but also brings in a lovely pepperiness to finish that off”. And there’s an eccentric dessert of red velvet cake and “brandy and coke” that leads to the extraordinary petit fours to come; but nothing like the petit fours of Mabaso’s Parisian life.

But let’s rewind. At the start, Wandile had told me, quietly, that if, by the end of the meal, we hadn’t teared up, “I will not have done my job properly”.

The tearjerker moment arrives, and we’re thanking the ancestors. A matchbox but Les Créatifs, not Lion as such; but it’s clearly that fiery icon. A candle (made of Ghanaian white chocolate but with a real wick that burns), fashioned by pastry chef Kenosi Malebye, who is also an artist; hand moulded, and he made something like 90. Inside, genoise sponge. A chocolate truffle made of 70% Ghanaian dark chocolate sourced by Wandile with permission from the king, who owns a large cacao plantation. Edible paper represents The Sowetan. Roots and ancestors; there’s a quiet in the room, the quiet of respect and contemplation. This has been a special day.

And, everywhere, the sustainability that characterises both of these men. Mabaso has a remarkable take on this: “How do we (he and Johannes) tell a story of what we both believe in and show how versatile we are in terms of cooking different cuts, different parts, and also looking at sustainability, a word that’s thrown about a lot?”

He’s talking about their meaty main course, but he casts his net much wider: “For me, sustainability is a lot of things, even running my business is all about sustainability. I need to sustain myself, I need to be healthy, to be bright, to be well, I need to be inspired, for me to inspire my team. So I need to sustain myself in order to sustain my team, my team sustains the restaurant and the restaurant sustains the guests; the guests sustain the city and the city sustains the country. And the country sustains the economy.”

That edible Sowetan newspaper had meaning for me. I’ve spent my adult life in newspapers. They’re important to me, far more than mere paper and words. They have told the stories of our times, our days, our struggles, our hopes and now and then our joys. And those of us who fill those columns take our task very seriously. All of us in the world of newspapers meet the famous people involved in our beat. And those two gentlemen are remarkable examples of a simple truth. That a good chef, a great chef, is an artist, and an artist has a story to tell. And they told them so well on that sunny day in Johannesburg.

Coda

The lamb reduction sauce was better on the third day, Wandile had said in passing, earlier, quietly. I had snuck up to the pass to ask for a little jug of it. That’s how to compliment a chef, by the way. More sauce please, chef. DM

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