Slumming it means using the knife and fork placed before you at a restaurant. However, if you can afford to drop R300 a plate at The Meat Company a couple of times a week for a few months, that fine establishment will reward your rapacious and unswervingly loyal, if slightly boring, taste with a steak knife of your very own.
It’s just a thoughtful way for the homegrown multinational with branches in Dubai, Israel and Australia to tell its rich and famous — or just plain rich — patrons that they are a cut above the rest.
Entering the wood-panelled eatery at Melrose Arch, you can’t miss the towering glass display case that looks like the property of a fastidious hitman, with its rows and rows of knives suspended above little nameplates.
”They’re for our regulars,” said one staff member, adding that while ”big spenders” could join the bladed bunch in a week, their more abstemious counterparts might take a month to acquire their own knife.
Describing them as ”big guys” — a reference to their social importance, not the girth they may acquire from regularly feasting at The Meat Company — the staff member said they were mostly business people — Tokyo Sexwale and Irvin Khoza are among them.
The Melrose Arch joint is conveniently a block away from the exclusive Virgin Active Classic, so you can hop off the treadmill with your own private screen and pop over for lunch.
It’s hard to get a slice of the action. You could order the R250 lobster thermidor, but the main courses range from R62 for a chicken breast to R120 for a T-bone steak. You would have to pile on a starter at between R30 and 40, extra sauces at R15 each and desserts at R25 to R35 to edge closer to the R300 requirement.
But of course the real budget-breaker is the wine. Cheapskates might happily guzzle a bottle of semi-sweet wine for R55, but most bottles go for over R100 and merely glancing at the imported champagne at over R1 000 made my wallet feel lighter. But then again, the fact that all my knives are safely in their drawer at home is a dead giveaway that I am not quite in the right league.