Pickled Pigs & Curried Lamb: Reggie Ntombela serves up the best of Rawdons

Rawdons Hotel in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands became a family favourite only in the past few years, but this venerable institution of old-fashioned hospitality and terrifically good food has quickly won a place in our hearts somewhere near our love for Matjiesfontein Village.

Finally, for a family wedding in May, we got to go back and take the family with us this time, urging them to order the Pickled Pig Pie and the famous Lamb Curry. This was a little unfair, as only one mealtime was free for dinner, the rest being devoted to the wedding. But it gives us an excuse to go back. 

This time, fleetingly, we got to meet chef Reggie Ntombela, when co-manager Terry Sterling ushered him to our table after we had sent chefs’ compliments. Subsequently, I conducted a sort of interview-by-carrier pigeon. The wedding swallowed up any chance of a personal chat that weekend.

It turns out that Reggie has been there whenever we have visited in the past few years, and was most likely there even when we first visited as a much younger family somewhere in the 1980s. But he wasn’t in the kitchen. Memories of those days are suitably vague, but I do remember sitting in a sunny space for lunch on some or other visit to our KZN cousins.

Reggie joined Rawdons in 1985, the year our daughter Rebecca was born, and this was her first visit, or at least the first she will remember.

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Reggie was hired as a maintenance hand, and was doing wallpapering and painting and sundry other tasks when, one day, Rawdons owner Wendy Attwood asked him if he would like to work in the kitchen. The Attwoods had bought the hotel from the Rawdons many years earlier. He began in the kitchen in 1998, and became head chef in 2019.

“He worked in every department in the kitchen,” Terry says, “from scullery, grilling and desserts, to cooking main meals and doing table d’hote cooking for the dining room, carveries, and doing à la carte cooking (his favourite). He worked with many executive chefs over the years and they mentored and taught him how to cook.”

Chefs move around at a whim today, but Reggie has spent his entire career at Rawdons. 

“It was a five-year internship learning from many chefs. Chef Gerard van Staden also got me into competition cooking and we went to many competitions and won many events,” Reggie is quoted as saying in The Midlands Magazine.

He told the magazine that his favourite meal on the Rawdons menu is the lamb curry and the oxtail, “but he also misses the table d’hote menu, which the hotel now only offers for weddings and other functions. One of the best things about being a chef is when Reggie gets feedback from his guests that they loved his meal. With no formal training, but a lot of passion, he is inspired to teach others how to cook in the way that he was taught. He loves using everyday ingredients to create “something spectacular”.

Also on the menu today is Reggie’s Pickled Pig beef pie.

Yes, it’s a beef pie, not pork. It’s called Pickled Pig because Pickled Pig is the name of the porter made by Rawdons Brewery. Porter is a very old-fashioned “dark brown bitter beer brewed from malt partly charred by drying at a high temperature”, to quote verbatim from Oxford Languages online.

The pie, therefore, is much like that classic of the British pub, the beef and ale pie, or the even more delicious beef and Guinness pie. Rawdons gives the pie its own spin by making it with their Pickled Pig porter with its bold flavour profile. Interestingly, the beef filling is made with both porter and red wine.

Here’s the lamb curry recipe followed by that for the Pickled Pig pie.

Reggie Ntombela’s famous Rawdons Lamb Curry

Reggie Ntombela’s Lamb Curry. (Photo: Supplied)

And his equally famous Pickled Pig beef pie. (Photo: Supplied)