Reduction, Reduction, Reduction: Musings on great food, luscious to the marrow

'Bowl'. Plated. Photo: Tony Jackman

By Tony Jackman

7 Feb 2020

It’s seldom that a food writer gets to share a delicious little secret with you. About a delectable find, a rare surprise. But here’s one, right here.

In great cooking with its roots in the French tradition of reduction, reduction, reduction, it’s the essence that counts. The boiling down of the original stock and simmering away until it hardly seems there, yet all the flavour of what went before is now concentrated in the delectable distillate at the bottom of the pot; the straining and addition of a liquor and the reducing of that back to its essence, now deeper still; then the addition of another liquor – the first more likely wine, the second perhaps a liqueur – and that too taken down to its quintessence. All the while, tasting, stirring, checking the seasoning, until finally the addition of one more little element that sends a sauce that’s already a wonder into a higher realm of sublimity: once you’ve cooked the meat that this sauce is to be served with, you deglaze the pan with wine or stock, stirring up all the intensely flavourful bits stuck to the pan, reduce it down, strain through a fine sieve, and cook it into your jus for a few minutes. All of this effort, time and patience must have gone into the making of the best bone marrow dish I have ever eaten, only last weekend.

Where, you will be wondering, might these marvellous morsels have been served. Which culinary palace in Cape Town must be offering this wondrous repast? Or has Jackman been to London lately, or Paris, or New York? Will this treasure of a dish be easy for me to visit if I live in the Mother City or in Joburg?

Well, nope. Sorry an’ all. But it is quite easy to reach, it turns out, if you don’t mind an hour and more in the air from either of those cities. You’ll need to book yourself a flight to the east coast of this great land. To Port Elizabeth. That’s where.

Pee Eee!!! Surely not! How could this be? All the best restaurants are in Cape Town and Franschhoek and Sandton and, um, Paternoster… aren’t they? … well, ja-nee. This one’s in Stanley Street in the windy/friendly city. And it’s all ours. So, put that in Van Hunks’ meerschaum pipe and smoke it, Cape Town.

The restaurant is called Muse, now four years old, and is owned by chefs Allan and Simone Bezuidenhout, and this was our second visit there. On the first, a year ago, I found it pretty good, but it seemed to be trying too hard to be a fine-dining sort of place. There was something uncomfortable about it, as if the owner-chefs hadn’t found their confidence. A tad try-for; I had the impression they’d seen how things are done and were copy-catting.

Not so now. Something is undoubtedly happening in this kitchen. The starter dish I had last weekend was the cooking of a master, but more than that, the cooking of someone with a great palate, of one who has mastered techniques, but who primarily just wants to cook bloody good food.

And that is the best thing that a chef can do. That’s what Heston Blumenthal does when he’s not toying with molecules. That’s what Marco Pierre White does, no matter what he’s cooking: manufacturing deliciousness with spoon and pot.

This particular deliciousness is called, on the Muse menu, “Bone marrow, pulled beef, jus with brioche and bone marrow butter”. That tiny little word in the middle back there. Jus. That’s the key to this dish. Everything else around it just ladles on the delight. The pulled beef, deeply flavourful, luxuriously soft. The bone marrow, silken and plentiful. Little blobs of white bone marrow butter, a generous gift to make a great dish yet greater. The brioche – my one complaint. It was good, but not nearly enough. More please next time, chef, it’s needed to mop up every last morsel of whatever’s left on the plate once everything else has been savoured.

So where are we? Five hundred and forty words into this story and I have described only one dish. There was other food. My friend Retief, who was born a farm boy but as an adult has dined royally in the great capitals of the world, had the bone marrow too, and his oohing and aahing had matrons at other tables blushing. I may have overheard one of them saying the When Harry Met Sally line. Ann had the salmon gravlax, with pickled cucumber and radish, avocado purée and black sesame tuile, and was delighted with it, not least what she said was a “charcoal-infused wafer cone”. Something like that (my money’s on the black sesame tuile). Di had the “fish cakes, vinegar chips and tartare sauce”. I appreciate a chef who has the sense to offer a frivolity, a mensch dish, alongside his showpieces. It suggests that my sense that there is no pretentiousness here is on the money.

Retief’s pork belly, he said, was every bit as good as his bone marrow.

My beef short rib, I replied, was every bit as good as my bone marrow.

My beef short rib main course. Photo: Tony Jackman

Retief's pork belly main course. Photo: Tony Jackman

The short rib had wondrous depths of flavour. It came with rectangular polenta cakes which were crisp without and soft within. Pleasant enough. And corn kernels were a useful counter to the richness of the meat and soy jus. The pork belly was smoked, and came with bacon jam (much eye rolling from the farm boy), carrot and potato mash, and “maple soy jus” which I presume is the same jus as the beef but finished with maple syrup. Makes sense for smoked pork. So we swapped a bit of beef for a bit of pork and each preferred our own (we said aloud) while silently thinking, goddamn, his is every bit as good.

The confit duck leg met with approval from the other side of the table, while, to my left, Di took her culinary life into her own hands and ordered the “bowl”. (You might want to peruse this before reading on.) There is, to their credit, only one “bowl” dish on the Muse menu. So it was ordered. And it was served.

On a plate.

Seriously. Here’s a picture of it:

'Bowl'. Plated. Photo: Tony Jackman

The waitress’s face was a picture when I pointed out that the bowl was plated on a plate, not bowled in a bowl. Struggling to compose her face, all she could say was, “It used to be served in a bowl but now it’s served on a plate.” Only a week after my rant about the silliness of bowl food, here was irrefutable evidence that it just makes no sense. Our mirth must have been heard in the kitchen. It was respectful laughter. We apologise.

On the plate/not in a bowl were falafels with roasted summer vegetable quinoa, brown mushroom, roasted cherry tomatoes, red pepper baba ganoush, minted pea puree and feta. Nothing, came the verdict, to write home about. Did it taste any better or worse for being bowl food that was served on a plate? We will never know.

A note or two about Stanley Street, the coolest strip in Port Elizabeth. Lined by characterful period cottages, replete with trees, this Richmond Hill stretch is abuzz with restaurants and bars, both upstairs and down. One of them is called simply Upstairs, in fact. A funky, inviting bar that could be quite at home in Cape Town’s Long Street. A band was setting up in a corner of the very long balcony while we had a drink or two before strolling across to Muse. It’s been mentally noted that we’ll return whenever we’re in Stanley Street, regardless of where we’re dining.

Richmond Hill, a small suburb on a hillside, is where we’d hope to live if this were our home city. Mildly hilly, with snatches of sea view all over the place, it has character in abundance. This in a city that we had overlooked for decades when we spun past it on the N2 roaring between the Garden Route and KwaZulu-Natal. Who’d want to go to Pee Eee? Wrong. Very wrong. We’ve grown to love the place during the last five years. In particular, I like that it hasn’t that pretentiousness that has engulfed Cape Town’s trendy communities in the past quarter-decade. May it never happen here.

I called Chef Allan Bezuidenhout this week with a couple of questions. It transpires he worked at the Angel Hotel in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, where my late uncle Granville lived and just up the road from the tiny village of Barrow, where Retief and Ann lived for some years. He does indeed reduce, reduce, reduce, he said, using many bones and taking much time. And the beef in the bone marrow starter does come from the short rib, but the fattier parts at the bottom of the pan, which become the pulled beef with its whopping flavour intensity.

They have, he added, no fish on the menu because he and Simone are Sassi ambassadors; so when occasionally there is properly fresh and sustainable fish, you’d find it as a special of the day.

But, much as I adore fish, who needs it when there are carnivorous dishes like their pork belly and beef short rib, two of at least three very good reasons to book yourself a table at this small (and, it must be said, noisy) little gem of a meat palace in lovely Richmond Hill.

Chefs Allan and Simone, don’t let your heads be turned if Franschhoek or Camps Bay try to entice you with promises of glory. Stay where you are; we deserve our great nosh pits too. And Cape Town’s wind is way worse. DM

Muse, 1b Stanley Street, Richmond Hill, Port Elizabeth. Call 041 582 1937. Muse Restaurant

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