Spekboom, naartjies and num nums take centre plate

Fresh hake with a spekboom velouté. Photo: Bianca Coleman

By Bianca Coleman

12 Apr 2019

Bistro fare celebrates African ingredients, from the familiar to the exotic, from springbok and warthog to num nums and Amarula, in a venture to make heroes of rural food in an urban environment.

In 2018, Societi Bistro tackled a mammoth project titled Bistros Go Global, which saw head chef Robert Giljam present a whopping 21 menus of three courses each, featuring modest and traditional meals from across the world, all representing the true essence of bistro food – meals that are home-styled, comforting and inexpensive.

What is not apparent to the untrained or naked eye is the amount of planning and preparation the whole team puts into such an undertaking. It required months of hard work, certainly a lot of sweat, maybe a bit of blood (because, you know, knives) and perhaps a tear or two as dishes are tested, judged and sometimes struck from the menu.

Even more remarkable was that while this was all going on, owner Peter Weetman was already looking ahead to The Next Big Thing. This time, Bistros Go Local embraces African ingredients, from the familiar to the exotic, from springbok and warthog to num nums and Amarula.

If the new concept of bistros is that it’s any rural food served in an urban environment, then surely we should be able to look at doing our own stuff, Weetman reasons.

We are just coming to the end of week three of seven, each showcasing three dishes as well as local wines and spirits, from Wednesdays to Saturdays for lunch and dinner.

Weetman hosted an intimate lunch for some very special guests (like me, for example), which began with Inverroche Verdant Gin mixed with fruity tonics and sparkling water for a refreshing aperitif on a ridiculously warm meant-to-be-autumn afternoon.

With all three courses written on chalkboard, the procedure for these menus – as well as all the daily specials – serves as a complement to the main menu; you can mix and match and dip in and dip out as the whim takes you. For the full experience, I recommend all three as well as the wines which have been selected to pair with them. A great deal of effort went into this, so it’s a nice thing to do in return. Plus, you won’t be sorry.

We had a thick soup of oak-smoked snoek with leeks and cream, to start, studded with tiny jewels of dried apricot playing the sweetness off the salty.

Oak-smoked snoek soup with leeks and cream. Photo: Bianca Coleman

It’s an interesting play on that braai favourite we all know and love. Every bowl was wiped clean. The wine was Fleur du Cap Series Privée Chenin Blanc, and like all the wines at Societi Bistro, is available by the glass or by the bottle.

The main course featured spekboom (an endless source of disappointment for me that this is not a direct translation to “bacon tree”, although it is the miracle ingredient du jour) in the pale green velouté upon which rested a lovely piece of hake for our main course. For so long, this fish has been underrated yet it is utterly delicious and has always been on the Sassi green list, which only adds to its attraction. It was paired with Waterford Sauvignon Blanc.

Fresh hake with a spekboom velouté. Photo: Bianca Coleman

To finish was a refreshing bowl of tart naartjie and Van Der Hum liqueur ice cream, paired with whatever wine you like.

Let’s go back to that marvellous spekboom, with its tiny plump fleshy leaves. Not only is it edible (I hope that’s obvious here) and high in Vitamin C, it is resilient and sucks an impressive amount of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The science tells us it is particularly good at photosynthesis, of which a byproduct is oxygen. Luckily it’s becoming more readily available, in our gardens and in our food, so plant some if you can – even in a pot on your windowsill. It needs lots of water but is otherwise quite hardy.

Like many chefs, Giljam loves it.

“Frankly, the best part of this has been exploring the local flora and fauna and finding these amazing flavours we never thought we’d come across. Spekboom is absolutely amazing… and the flavour!” he enthuses.

Says Weetman of Bistros Go Local: “This is all about finding local ingredients. We didn’t want to try to reinvent South African traditional food, like bobotie or anything like that. And this isn’t foraging either; these are all things that are cultivated.

“But I think that what’s great about bistro food is that you can emulate it at home. It’s simple, and it’s all about the ingredients.”

Along the journey of discovery, Weetman was also inspired by spekboom.

“For me, it is the hero,” he says. “When it’s raw it has this amazing lemony aftertaste and when it’s cooked, it’s quite garlicky. You could take beautiful tomatoes, maybe some goats’ cheese, and then put the raw leaves on that to give it a tangy, slightly acidic element which will lift all the other ingredients.”

To illustrate what goes into pulling off something like Bistros Go Local, the team began with a little more than 100 dishes – conceptually and theoretically.

“We culled a lot when we saw we were emulating other food, like Asian and European dishes,” explains Weetman.

“And there were some flavour combinations that weren’t exactly on point, so we narrowed it down that way too. Rooibos is amazing and we do incorporate it, but we have a lot more than just that. There is so much out there… we have only scratched the surface.”

Once the dishes had been edited and culled to about 70, the months-long process of testing and tasting followed, eventually bringing it down to 21.

“The difficulty is you’re often doing this out of context because you’re preparing for winter, in the middle of summer when you’re tasting. So we turned the air conditioning right up and pretended!” laughs Weetman, promising that next year will be even more refined. “We’ve already noticed some improvements we can make,” he says.

Looking ahead to the remaining four weeks, Giljam says there is a wild garlic and wild mushroom soup coming up that will Blow. Your. Socks. Off.

“We’re also making a lot of ice creams, rose geranium being one of the absolute best. It’s beautiful. And hake en papillote – by taking a traditional French technique and spiking it with our traditional ingredients, we’re cross-pollinating the two cultures,” he says. DM

Societi Bistro is at 50 Orange Street, Gardens in Cape Town. Telephone 021 424 2100

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