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The stellar art materials of Nieu-Bethesda’s fynbos queen

Three of the courses Barbara Weitz served to a group of 40 veterinarians. (Photos: Barbara Weitz)

7 Feb 2025

On a Karoo night, underneath a Nieu-Bethesda sky, Barbara Weitz is paying homage to the constellations above. The delectables on your plate — and even that has something otherworldly about it — are a savvy reflection of the starry, starry night.

It is the first night of the new menu at Barbara and Johan Weitz’s Stirlings @ The Ibis restaurant at their The Ibis guest house in this mysterious little hamlet hidden in the mountains not far from Graaff-Reinet.

Every month, Barbara crafts a new Karoo Food Experience in a way only she can conjure. It is seldom that this can be said of anyone on the planet, but Barbara is one of those rare people, and rare cooks, who can create something that no others can or even should do, by rights. Because, like the art of any artist, her work with food is singular and matchless.

Her art materials are the wild greens, strange herbs and peculiar berries that grow in the veld and along the riverbank. But her palette is her imagination.

Her new menu, for the duration of February, is Constellations. Yet, even though she has designed six courses of food art as pleasing to the palate as it is to the eye, in the middle of this week she was doing a new menu for a specialist group. But we’ll come back to that whimsical, fantastical menu.

Above us, the galaxies may be oblivious of our little selves in a hamlet far below, but on our plates is the stuff of culinary magicians waving wands in the kitchen.

Horses saunter past. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

And everything is a story. While we wait for our wine to arrive, horses walk past the glassless window between the courtyard and the street. There are always horses in Nieu-Bethesda, and always boys on other horses not far away.

We’re welcomed to our table beneath the stars and the Constellations menu is explained.

“This month we pay homage to the southern hemisphere star constellations. In Bethesda especially, it feels as if you are hugged by the stars.”

The first thing placed before us is familiar. We have been blessed with Barbara’s special menus before, and always there is the welcoming shot glass of Veldtroos, a palate cleanser and immune booster made of four medicinal herbs.

It’s a distillation of balderjan (wild mint), wilde-als (African wormwood), veldtee (the name of a particular herb used for making an enchanting, well, veld tea), kankerbos (which famously is believed to help fight cancer), and the more familiar lemon verbena.

Like chef Kobus van der Merwe of Wolfgat at Paternoster, Barbara Weitz has a singular ability to extract magical flavours from combinations of the things that grow in their terrain.

The Constellations menu really begins with the next course:

Eridanus (The River)

Eridanus. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

We’re told: “We forage along the water furrow and the furrow water helps us mill our wheat to make our bread.”

A white “river” with dark specks snakes across a shiny white plate. We’re enjoined to “follow the river of karee berry and herb spread”. There’s a wonderfully crunchy little grapeskin cracker, and the little bread rolls are described to us as “stone ground wheat bread rocks”. Agave blossoms slink alongside the river, but the dish is chiefly about that light, frothy herb butter.

Scorpio

Scorpio. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

“Here is Scorpio from under her rock.”

If Scorpio adds her sting to our southern sky, it must be the bite of chilli makataan (wild watermelon) that sits in its amber temptation atop this perfect star shortcrust cracker, along with roasted onion and balsamic tomatoes. Like a ring around a star, it is enveloped by a swirl of balsamic kapokbos drizzle.

This course typifies Barbara’s special cuisine, a marriage of an artist’s eye with a chef’s palate. Exquisite yet, when you think about it, it’s clever rather than fussy.

Orion, the Hunter

Orion's Belt. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

And the best looking dish of the night arrives. It is Orion’s Belt, a stupendously crunchy filo pastry “belt” with a delightful surprise inside — so delicious that I write this down in my notes: “The most beautiful Barbs course I have ever eaten. Classy.”

The glaze dotted on top is made of cranberries and kapokbos, the wild rosemary that grows in much of the Karoo. A bed of rocket shoots out in all directions.

Libra, the Weighing Scale

Libra. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

Only Barbara Weitz could conceive of lamb ribs as a scale, and if what is being measured is her own imagination, her ingenuity will surely outweigh the weights on the other end.

At the base of the “scale” is pulled lamb, with a mound of umqua pap and pumpkin, with slow-roasted lamb ribs balanced on top of it. On guard at either side are soldiers of grilled cactus leaves and, nearby, roasted beetroot purée with wilde-als.

The scales, Barbara says, are “pointing us in the direction of unique combinations of flavour”.

Pyxis — The Compass

Pyxis. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

The first of two dessert courses is an off-white affair with golden shards. It’s a panna cotta flavoured with veldtee decorated with “acacia flower sugar art (spun sugar) and Queen of the Night coulis”.

The last ingredient makes this dish pretty rare — the Queen of the Night cacti in the Weitz’s gardens had already stopped their brief annual flowering. The coulis was made from the fruit, of course, with its tiny black seeds looking so pretty on the plate, and that wobble-perfect panna cotta preening alongside. The fruit lasts much longer than the magnificent whiter bloom, which blooms at night and, by morning, is near to its death.

Southern Cross

Southern Cross. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

To “show our way back home” is this beautiful cross of white chocolate infused with lemon verbena, a dark chocolate truffle infused with balderjan (wild mint), milk chocolate and walnut truffles (from a farm near Graaff-Reinet) and a wilde-als meringue star.

It’s somewhere between dessert and petit-fours, and people are getting up from their tables to seek the Southern Cross in the night sky. Wonder is consumed.

And in every dish, even the sweet ones, the distinctive leaves of the surrounding terrain can be tasted, just as you can smell their essences in the Nieu-Bethesda air.

Green dots are a virus, white dots are parasites

Three of the courses Barbara Weitz served to a group of 40 veterinarians. (Photos: Barbara Weitz)

As we’re about to leave at breakfast hour the next morning, Johan walks into the lounge with a wooden plank and a tall, slim glass vial. He and his friend Attie Nel, a master carpenter, are going to spend the day making 40 “plates”, so to speak, for a group of veterinarians who were due for dinner this Wednesday. A round is gouged into a corner of each plank, to fit a vial full of “blood”.

On Thursday Barbara sent me a menu breakdown with photos to match. The vets’ specially tailored Karoo Food Experience menu for a 40-year reunion (so it appears they were veteran vets) was called Diagnosis.

Dishes were called, in order, Patient, Blood Sample, Disease, Surgery, Cured, and Gratitude.

Agave spears look like tranquilliser darts. Green dots represent a virus (actually chilli chimichurri), white dots are parasites (actually aîoli), red dots are bacteria (actually kapokbos and cranberry glaze). Pap is shaped into a bone. A “muscle” is made of pulled lamb. For the “Cured” dessert, there was a cured ash croissant with chevron, makataan and preserved figs. For the Prescription course, a syringe is filled with roasted garlic ice cream. This is Barbara thanking the vets for what they’ve done with their professional lives.

Soon, Barbara and Johan will be heading out of town for one of their occasional road shows. A 90th birthday in Cape Town; a turn at the Knysna Fringe Festival on 21 and 22 March, a function elsewhere to present their Constellations menu, and another in Wellington.

So even if you can’t get to Nieu-Bethesda, chances are you might be able to persuade them to come to you. DM

Stirlings @ The Ibis, Martin Street, Nieu-Bethesda | Call Barbara or Johan at +27 72 110 6254 | email [email protected] or [email protected]

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