Lynda Gilfillan
There’s a baby grand piano laden with candelabra and kitsch in a magical dining room in the middle of the great Karoo. Just when you thought you couldn’t face another Ultra City, and there’s no way you can turn back, because you’ve travelled 700km and there’s still 700km to go before you hit Clifton, another drab dorp but one with a difference is suddenly framed by the windscreen.
This time there’s a seedy Caltex garage, and one or two abandoned shops on the side of the road but, hey, there’s also a rather subtle sign saying “No 3, Darling Street”, promising food and a bed. So you decide, what the hell, and turn right, left, and right again, and in three minutes or so you feel a bit like Alice when she fell through the hole and landed in Wonderland.
Hanover is the tiniest of dorps in the heart of the country. It clings for dear life to the N1 that roars past it in cruel oblivion. And yet, right here, Mark Banks (he of laugh-a-minute fame), Derek Vaughan, a retired bassoonist, and one-time theatre design specialist Lawrence Huckstep have pooled their considerable talents to create a unique restaurant and B&B establishment: “No. 3, Darling Street”.
Vaughan discovered Hanover in 1991 when sheltering from a Karoo dust-storm. Love was instantaneous, and the desire to escape the rat race irresistible. So, with his current partners, he established a successful Karoo-style guest house whose camp, kitsch outrageous touches soon became de rigueur with a certain class of traveller for whom getting there is as much fun as the destination.
Travellers enter a kind of time-warp. The ochre-coloured restaurant, its stoep bordering the pavement of a broad gravel road, beckons with strains of 1950s smooch music (when last did you hear Nat King Cole sing Smoke gets in your eyes?), gaudy fairy lights, and a bar full of Africana and colonial memorabilia. Guests can quaff a beer or sip a cocktail under a tinsel-framed “Die Bou van ‘n Nasie” and a photograph of the 1947 royal visit. Someone in the house is, clearly, a compulsive junk-shop rummager. No Whistle Stop or Select highway caf this, not a hint of the bland, predictable franchise culture that has colonised our national routes.
The dining room is extravagantly lit with an array of candles. Wooden surfaces gleam, and beyond the open French doors, a garden glows (“Disneyland in the Karoo,” explains Huckstep). Lucas Zozi is a waiter with a suave style and wide smile. There’s a set menu. “People don’t want to make decisions when they get here; we take over. They can take a walk to the koppie or flop on to their beds until we serve them dinner.”
Travellers can savour, as we did, the tangy delights of a pumpkin and orange soup, 22 (yes!) snails in butter and lemon, fall-off-the-bone Karoo lamb knuckles, creamy leeks that smell and taste like leeks used to (remember?), crunchy beans and bacon and the best potato croquettes with the faintest whiff of nutmeg this side of Paris. And the Cape brandy tart was as sweet as it should be, though not quite syrupy enough.
The food in keeping with the dcor is fabulous: a blend of robust country fare and clever urban touches, organic to the point of being orgasmic. “I’m in charge of parks and recreation, and that includes the veggie garden. Even though I’d never before grown anything apart from fat,” says Banks, who goes on to explain, “I’ve always lived ‘between’ never quite been ‘there’, so I live here two weeks each month because there’s nothing and I can read all of Charles Dickens.”
People come here for good food, good conversation, but also the cleanest air in the country, and a million stars thus experiencing something of what Olive Schreiner did in the seven years she lived here with husband Cron. And when you hit the road the next day, together with the bottles of home-made greengage and brandy jam and pickled onions, and the fruit-shaped candles made by the tannie in the neighbouring dorp, you’ll take with you memories of stars like you’ve never seen before, and fairy lights, and magic in the middle of the great nowhere that is the Karoo.
The details
Bed and breakfast costs R175 a person; and dinner R75 a person Tel/fax: (053) 643 0254 or e-mail [email protected].