Madeleine Roux
The oasis that is the Andries Stockenstrm guest house comes as more than a surprise. The gigantic house with its wide, yellowwood plank floors gives on to a spacious stoep and a garden crammed with fruit trees. A delicious smell of rich wine sauces, herbs and fruity pud wafts through the house.
Beatrice Barnard won the Full Service Guest House Award this year for her 14-seater restaurant and four guest rooms. It’s hardly believable that this (Paris) Ritz- trained, qualified cordon bleu chef would come to hang her hat in a town 700km from Johannesburg and make a reputation which reaches right into France and Belgium.
Frans Karoo is the way she describes her food – top-class local ingredients treated lovingly and presented with true French flair. Barnard doesn’t mince words either. She’s a perfectionist who sneers at cooks who can’t tell the difference between a galantine and a ballotine.
Sixteen fig trees, apricots, lemon, plum and orange trees and a splendid vegetable garden supply the fresh ingredients of her picture-perfect salads and spectacular desserts, such as figs with rum and creme frache.
Citrus sauces are a foil for the rich, dark meats such as loin of kudu, ostrich fillet and swartwildebees.
She is renowned in Graaff-Reinet for marching into a butchery, meat raw and bloody in hand, and demanding loudly that the hapless butcher replace this at once.
“It was necessary,” she says. “Since then I’ve had impeccable meat.”
Barnard is a plattelander who lived many years in Pretoria before moving with her retired husband Andr to Graaff-Reinet.
Her passion for fresh food, authentic French taste and local ingredients, such as the incomparable Karoo lamb, has made her a legend among serious eaters. Her establishment is featured in several French and Belgian tourist guides and one Frenchman made the 700km journey from Johannesburg to eat at her table, returning the next day. “They know how to eat,” she says.
His breakfast would have been figs and apricots or a bowl of prunes … yeah, poached in port and cloves. An omelette would have included garlic and fresh herbs, or at special request, a succulent bit of kudu-liver pt. “My food is for the strong of heart,” she explains.
She also serves goat cheese with baked figs (“I have four varieties”), lightly pan- fried venison fillets or medaillons of loin, and serves them with a wine-enriched sauce, mousse of Jerusalem artichokes on the side.
The crme brle is made with thick yellow farm cream. And Barnard will tell you in detail how to make all her dishes. No kitchen secrets – everything is shared. She is a night cook, inventing and perfecting while the rest of the house sleeps.
One guest remarked that no matter how wonderfully clean the Karoo air, it was a pleasure to enter a restaurant that has the perfume of Paris.
Andries Stockenstrm Guest House and restaurant, 100 Cradock Street, Graaff-Reinet. Booking essential. Telephone and fax 0491-24575