The other type is harder to pin down, because its memories are made by things not necessarily connected to the food. A new year’s eve chicken that was only ready ten minutes after twelve. A simple snack of tapenade and crackers made special by the fact that it was eaten on the olive estate with a view towards early snow on the Winterhoek mountains. Friends and stories, moments in time that cannot be created off a menu because they just happen.
Or, perhaps, you can create this experience?
First, place your restaurant on a dune next to the sea, five kilometres outside of Lamberts Bay in the middle of nowhere. Then, dispense with almost all traditional restaurant props, including cutlery (I’m not joking – whatever cannot be eaten by hand is scooped up in mussel shells) and menus. Prepare the food in a central kitchen area over open fires and serve it on communal tables where everybody just help themselves. Make the eating area flow onto the beach so that the kids can run riot in between bites of food. Shelter everyone from the elements with sackcloth shade nets and dried out muisbos branches.
Call it the Muisbosskerm. Repeat for thirty years.
The ‘menu’, which really is just a list of the various types of seafood (at least six) that they serve over the course of a leisurely three hour lunch, contains the best of what the West Coast has to offer, including lobster and tuna steaks, but also lots of local fruit, bread baked fresh in the oven that morning, koeksisters for dessert and bokkoms. The soetpatats alone is enough to make you come back.
Elands Bay Road, 5 km's from Lambertsbay, West Coast, South Africa
You can visit their website here.
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