The food-guru route

Whenever I’m asked what I do for a living, I wait for the “ah, that’s so glamorous” response, and I must agree. I especially love it around deadline time, when 120 pithy words on each of my 110 freshly checked restaurants have to be filed.

I do this with all my stomach-calming potions close at hand, dreaming of the day my husband and I will be taking off for the country roads on our motorbike, roaming around the vlaktes in search of new horizons and aromas. If “country cuisine” sounds like an oxymoron, it’s often the truly creative cook who escapes the confines of fashion dictates.

Granted, Richard Carstens’s “deconstructed” cuisine is a debate that sits firmly on the front burner, as is his hideout, the fabulous boutique hotel of Lynton Hall in Pennington.

Carstens, who has just been voted as our top chef by Eat Out magazine, talks about his mentor, Ferran Adria of elBulli restaurant in Spain. “Like Adria says, there’s a moment that no one can really define, when something alchemical happens with the food you’re preparing. You can’t explain that kind of magic.”

If you’ve planned cleverly, you’ll do a magical helicopter trip from Lynton Hall, swoop across the KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg and land at Cleopatra Mountain Farmhouse. This intimate gourmet getaway with its awesome setting is tucked into the end of the road in the Kamberg. Richard Poynton — outgoing, jovial and a self-confessed lover of what nature provides in food and good wine — serves dinners that are a sumptuous six-course affair.

The Poyntons are members of the group Good Cooks and their Country Houses, as is Beatrice Barnard at the Stockenstrom Guest House in the Karoo in Graaff-Reinet. “My being is that of a country girl,” says the extraordinary Paris-trained cook. What is euphemistically called Karoo cuisine is raved about by international gourmands who stay at the Barnards to feast on Beatrice’s European- flavoured kos. “And you don’t have to use expensive ingredients to create something fabulous,” she says.

In the Little Karoo, Annette le Roux opened her small restaurant, Jemima’s, in Oudtshoorn to great acclaim almost right from the beginning. Although she’s no longer there, the new owners continue the tradition.

Bypass Cape Town and there is, of course, that almost impossibly exquisite village. Well, the way it’s growing, I use “village” when referring to Franschhoek the way I’d say “sylph-like” when I talk about my expanding girth. Two award-winners, Margot Janse at Le Quartier Francais and Matthew Gordon of Haute Cabriere — tucked into the mountain outside Franschhoek — cook there with great abandon and acclaim.

Then head for Paternoster where one of my favourite hard-working gals settled recently. Suzie Holtzhausen, who sold her famous cookery school in Johannesburg, now has a unique concept. Stay at her guest house, discover Suzie’s culinary secrets and sit around a large table with some interesting locals to devour the fabulous meal.

Up the road, in a manner of speaking, is Upington in the Northern Cape. On the banks of the green seam of the Orange River which runs through the centre of the town sits Niel Stemmet’s award-winning guest house, Le Must. Although French-Provincial cuisine was always Niel’s biggest inspiration, he says he serves boerekos — albeit with a twist, and using local ingredients only.

Niel likes food with soul. “There’s nothing better than visiting friends on a farm, sitting down to a simple luncheon that stretches through the afternoon, of tender, falling-off-the-bone ribs that have been in the oven overnight, with home-baked bread, farm butter and a salad straight from the garden.”

It’s that very farm I’ll probably be heaving my expanded girth to very soon. I could do with that meal. And no deadlines.

Gwynne Conlyn is a widely published food and travel writer and broadcaster. Her new book, Food Gurus Uncovered, is available at all good book stores

The lowdown