Evoking a wistful yearning for la dolce vita is La Perla restaurant on Sea Point promenade. Opened by Italian immigrant Emiliano Sandri 40 years ago, it has been in the family ever since.
In the 1970s this is where the Junoesque women and their playboys hung out with the stars to find themselves in the social pages, or later in celebrity surgeon Chris Barnard’s saucy memoirs.
The classic menu has hardly changed; the music remains nostalgic Latin — Nina Rota, Cesária Évora, Eros Ramazzotti. The older clientele know by name the dignified waiters in their starched white uniforms. Sandri’s sons have introduced a cigar lounge and wine shop.
After almost a year of building work, during which the restaurant never closed, it is finally renovated; a good improvement, slightly expanded, with a cleaner look and better functionality, without having sacrificed the features that keep it unique. The heavy, wooden, carved Ceasar chairs and the fabulous lipstick ceiling lights are still in place.
If you arrive around noon, you may have steaming bread straight from the oven. A starter of garlic and chilli calamari (R60) has never failed me. Their Mossel Bay oysters (R18 each) are splendidly creamy. The Italian table salad (R50) is peasant style, always with boiled egg, olives, heads of lettuce, cucumbers and carrots cut crudité style.
For mains, the seared tuna (R120) is infallible, or the seafood tagliattele (R150), tomato based with generous amounts of mussels, clams, juicy shelled prawns and octopus tentacles.
La Perla Restaurant, Beach Road, Sea Point. Open Monday to Sunday for breakfast (10am until noon), lunch and dinner (until 11pm). Tel: 021 439 9538.