Don’t mess with success

When I first moved to this town more than five years ago, there were two “white tablecloth” restaurants, both worthy of note: Dale’s Place and Chaplan’s.

Dale’s Place was situated in a charming old house on the “right” side of the highway (meaning the side nearest the beach), conveniently located next to a traffic light that allowed patrons easy access to the side street parking. You couldn’t get a table without a booking, the menu offerings ranged from the prosaic to the exotic, and preparation was sublime. It was the kind of place where you reserved a table for celebrations, special dinners, or to treat yourself to a fine meal accompanied by fine wines, followed by a shock to your credit card.

Chaplan’s, located on the other side of the highway but too convenient to a posh suburb to be ignored, had a different sort of menu and somewhat more subdued pricing. It didn’t require bookings, but it was not uncommon to wait at the bar for a table as it was always busy. The innovative menu…tempura prawn or mezze platter appetisers, champagne sorbet for dessert, for example…kept our taste buds alert and our wallet open.

You may have noticed that I have referred to both establishments in the past tense… There is a reason for that: Dale’s has been consigned to the mists of history and Chaplan’s is barrelling headlong down the same path. In both cases, the owners and innovators of the venues have sold up, taken their profits and run, leaving ignorant Philistines in control of what were once fine dining establishments.

We actually ate at Dale’s shortly after the handover: we had no idea Dale was no longer at the helm and we were baffled at the unexpectedly poor service, puzzling menu additions and deletions, and the decline in the quality of the food. We never went back, feeling we had been charged premium prices for seriously substandard food and insulting service. Obviously we were not the only patrons who felt this way, as Dale’s began a slow, agonizing, embarrassingly public decline. It stood on a prominent corner where we were forced to witness its painful demise each time we drove past. At first, we noticed that the veranda, an area usually packed with patrons, was without diners. Then one of us remarked on the emptiness of the parking lot. A deli…which I visited and found virtually without stock…opened in part of the unused space, and then a piano bar sign was prominently posted on the outside of what was once a fine dining establishment. The deli morphed into a café, and then a gift shop, and big signs offering specials went up on the august façade of what was now a failed restaurant. Drive by today and you will find a small office building where, only five years ago, a venerable old residence housed a first rate restaurant that delighted the palates of local fine food aficionados.

A couple of months ago we visited Chaplan’s and the first thing I noticed was a change in the menu: many of the things I liked were missing. Hubby soon remarked on the indifferent service and, reminding me of Dale’s, wondered aloud if the place had been sold. Last night we returned and we noted that the place was uncharacteristically empty for a Friday. We took a table, ordered drinks, and opened the menu only to find it had been stripped of everything I liked and nothing new and tantalizing had been inserted to take up the slack. In fact, only one new menu item was discovered…an appetizer that, somehow unsurprisingly, had been misspelled. We paid for our drinks and left, but not until determining that, indeed, the restaurant had been sold and the new owners had reinvented the menu to “personalize” it a little. We won’t be back and Hubby opines that in a year or less, Chaplan’s will either have changed hands again or will be as defunct as Dale’s.

Obviously the new owners of Dale’s Place, an Italian couple, knew their business was in trouble. They implemented a dizzying array of changes in at attempt the stem the flow of red ink, all to no avail. But did they ever bother to ponder the reason for the decline and target their efforts in that direction? I don’t think so…and I think if they had, they could have turned it around.

You see, Dale’s was well-regarded for its menu, in particular its game dishes, local seafood and “Cape cuisine”…local Cape Town traditional foods. Our disastrous last meal there revealed many of the original dishes missing and, in their place, Italian food. Sorry, but Italian food is not what Dale’s patrons came to eat, so changing the menu was a really stupid thing to do. Since the new owners retained Dale’s kitchen staff, it would have been a very simple thing to keep the menu intact and the people whose patronage made Dale’s a local landmark would continue to come in to eat it. But they had to put their own personal mark on the place and introduce dishes that were not in keeping with the restaurant’s traditional cuisine. They took away things the patrons liked and substituted things they didn’t like…Italian food, aside from pizza, is not a big hit here in South Africa…and the patrons reacted predictably…they went away and stayed away and the restaurant eventually had to close its doors. They bought one of the most successful, well-regarded restaurants in Cape Town and killed it, all because of ego.

Sadly, the same thing seems to be happening at Chaplan’s, and I don’t understand why. If the venue is successful, if it has a following and the patrons like the food, why change it? Sure, a slow introduction of new things may ultimately add some favourites to the menu, but to take over a thriving restaurant and immediately change the menu, to remove customer favourites and substitute unknowns, is just business suicide! It is arrogant and stupid and counter-productive and business buyers who engage in such foolishness deserve the financial drubbing they eventually take.

Common sense would dictate that the diners who mob a restaurant specializing in prime steaks and game meat are not there for Italian food! If your heart is set on running an Italian restaurant, buy one of those that is in the tank and make things better, or open an Italian joint from scratch! And in a more eclectic venue like Chaplan’s, cheapening the plates by removing garnishes and sauces, and forgetting the importance of presentation, serves only to make patrons nervous about the restaurant’s future and impels them to seek new places to eat. Changing the menu to “inject a personal touch,” as we were informed at Chaplan’s, is a really dim-witted and egotistical thing to do: if the restaurant is turning a profit on the existing menu, in what world does significantly changing that menu equate to increased revenues? People are funny about their food, and when you change it…especially when you take away the things they like…they don’t cheerily embrace your substitutions, they go find another place where they can get what they want instead of what you want to give them!

As Jeff Foxworthy likes to say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Good bye, Dale’s Place…we miss you. Good bye, Chaplan’s…we already miss the place you used to be, the menu you once had. Let’s just hope that Alexia’s doesn’t change hands next!

Click on the wings!

and look for me under the Violet Burroughs tab

Eggs should not be crunchy!

I’ve never been particularly picky about what I eat…fish, organ meats, slimy greens, and yellow squash notwithstanding…but I will own up to being a bit choosy about how some foods are prepared. I don’t think my mother was truly a bad cook…she did turn out some excellent fare from time to time…but she was a lazy, unimaginative and disinterested cook, which put her offerings on the same level as those who were bad cooks.

My mother liked to fry things. She had a massive cast iron skillet in which she prepared everything from “Swiss Steak” (a round steak boiled in tomato soup until it was well done and tough as leather) to “Glop” (undrained fried, crumbled ground beef…lowest cost, highest fat content…mixed with a can of pork and beans, ladled over dry toast). On the stove she kept a kitschy little 3-piece brushed aluminium-and-pink plastic set of containers, one labelled “salt”, one labelled “pepper,” and the third labelled “grease.” I kid you not.

Anything my mother fried was fried in grease from that can. If there wasn’t enough grease, she would add a few gobs of shortening, which was always the cheapest Crisco substitute she could find. And the can was never emptied out and cleaned and filled with “fresh” grease. Only the inner lid, a disk full of fine holes intended to strain out solid bits, was ever washed. Did it get rancid? Of course. Did it make any difference? Of course not.

She seldom cooked breakfast, so her mangled version of fried or scrambled eggs seldom crossed my plate. And just as well, since she took umbrage at my food peculiarities, like cutting all the fat off a piece of meat or forking out the gelatinous pieces of pork fat from the beans before I ate them. I neither salted nor peppered my food, her efforts at the stove being more than sufficient. But once in a while we had breakfast for dinner and that was when, if I could get away with it, I would develop a horrific stomach ache just before dinner and go to bed with nothing but dry toast on my stomach.

Breakfast, at my mother’s hands, was a horrifying affair. Fatty bacon (streaky bacon, for non-Americans…and more streak than bacon) would be fried long enough to render out a good amount of grease, but not long enough to crisp the fat. Floppy slices of bacon with rubbery bits of greasy fat attached would be drained on paper, and the fat remaining in the pan would be further heated until it was sizzling and crackling. Mother then would break eggs into this seething vat of boiling grease and you could hear a roar of crackling as the cold, wet eggs dropped into the roiling fat. Grease would spatter everywhere, usually eliciting a curse or two from the cook, and she would set to work splashing hot grease all over the tops of the eggs to thoroughly cook them. The result was, invariably, tragic.

Have you ever eaten eggs you could not chew? Seriously…have you ever had eggs put in front of you that you were unable to chew? To this day I have never understood why the bacon got the benefit of a few minutes draining on absorbent paper and those eggs did not. Glistening with grease and flecked with burnt bits of bacon that had been floating in the grease, yolks runny and the edges crisp and brown, the eggs could not be cut even with knife and fork. Since the rule in our house was you at whatever Mother put on your plate, breakfast-for-dinner was a horrifying prospect. Rubbery bacon with the fat still uncooked and oozing grease with each grinding of the teeth, crisp eggs floating in a pool of fat, the edges brown and chewy, the underside a stiff, browned, almost plastic sheet, the whites overdone and strongly flavoured, the yolks undercooked and runny…it’s a wonder I can face an egg today!

Scrambled eggs were no better. Into that same overheated grease were tossed a couple of eggs that were then vigorously stirred with a fork until they were crumbly. Swimming in brown grease, they, too, were delivered to table without benefit of draining, so they sat in a slippery pool, their oily fat winking hideously up at me in the harsh kitchen light.

My mother was a person of little patience and therein laid the source of her problems in the kitchen. Whatever was not fried to cinders or boiled into limp greyness was pressure cooked into a colourless mass. Foods requiring patience and finesse never graced our table: homemade soups and stews were rare, casseroles unheard of, and roasts completely unknown. If it couldn’t be boiled, fried, or rendered unrecognizable in the pressure cooker, we didn’t eat it.

In self-defence, at the age of seven, I began to cook. And I started with eggs. I would drag a chair up to the stove, and because my little fingers had trouble cracking eggs without scatter shards of the shell into the pan, I cracked them into a cup where I could fish the shell fragments out before putting the eggs into the pan. I would take a bit of butter (margarine, actually…Mother was too tight to buy anything but the cheapest margarine in the store and then watch its consumption like a hawk) and slowly melt it in the big skillet, waiting until it was liquid but not browned. I would slip the eggs into the butter slowly and let them cook. Because I wasn’t big enough to flip an egg over with any degree of skill or accuracy, I broke the yolks so they could cook through, then delivered the egg to a plate with a piece of dry toast on it…Mother would never know I used the butter for cooking the eggs rather than to butter my toast!

It took a while to master, but I quickly realized that a really good egg had soft edges, was cooked clear through, and actually did not taste like rancid grease. It also had a lovely, delicate flavour when allowed to stand alone and not buried in salt, pepper, burnt flecks of bacon and floating in a puddle of fat. Over time, I branched out into preparing other things for myself, although I never did find acceptable ways to prepare offal or most fish. Greens, I eventually found, were often palatable in salads and yellow squash made an acceptable substitute for pumpkin in pies.

But eggs were one of my first epiphanies of self-reliance: I not only could do for myself, I was capable of doing better than my mother. I was, of course, smart enough to refrain from revealing this information to my mother lest I find breakfast for the whole family dumped on my young shoulders…I was already responsible for cleaning the kitchen after dinner each night and minding my younger, bigger brother after school…I didn’t need more chores!

My husband tells me that I am the best breakfast cook he has ever known. No matter how good the breakfasts are at our various Sunday morning places, he always says mine are the best he has eaten. And he agrees with my breakfast mantra: Eggs are not supposed to be crunchy!

Sunday Morning Breakfast Out: Take 2

Hubby and I went out to breakfast yesterday and decided to return to the same place this morning: he, because they serve “baked beans” (pork and beans to Americans) with one of the breakfasts, me because I was curious if the speedy service we received yesterday was the norm.

This little coffee shop, called Beanz, is inside the small Table View Mall and located directly across from the entrance to the Pick n Pay (South Africa’s answer to Safeway). At 9:30 on a Saturday morning, the parking lot was jammed and the mall…including Beanz…was busy. Bu the service was fast, efficient and pleasant, despite the place being nearly full.

Hubby and I returned this morning and it was a whole different story. Where yesterday we took the only available booth in the place, this morning there were only two occupied tables when we walked in. The young lady who brought us our menus…before I even had my sunglasses off and traded for my normal specs…took our drink orders and when Hubby started to ask for sweetener, her eyes flicked to the little container of sugar and sweetener packets already on the table.

If yesterday’s service was good, today’s was phenomenal. There were three employees out front…two servers and a manager…and nobody went without attention for long. Before our drinks were served, another server came and took our order, no quibbling over special orders (Hubby wanted a frank with his breakfast) and or quailing over scrambling the eggs. No sooner had our order been taken than the original server appeared with the drinks…and my Coke Light was a full 340ml can, not one of those puny little ones or a fountain coke which always seem to be just a wee bit flat.

The food arrived before Hubby had finished his coffee, and everything was perfect. Generous portions correctly prepared and served quickly…even the toast was hot enough to melt the butter spread onto it. During the course of our meal the server stopped by once to see if everything was ok, and my plate was removed shortly after I finished. There was no waiting around to pay the bill because the server was too busy chatting with a co-worker…nope, when Hubby put his credit card out with the little folder, the server was right there to collect it. By the time our bill was settled and we were on our way back to the car, we had been in the place only half an hour…

Contrasted with our experience of three weeks ago, this place was a breath of fresh air: good food, well-prepared, efficiently served, all at a cost of only R135, tip included!

Beanz, we are coming back! And if you are reading this in Cape Town, I highly recommend you try this place!

All the eggs are brown!

Originally published March 31, 2004

While preparing breakfast for my husband this morning it suddenly struck me that I haven’t seen a white egg since I got here. Not that the color of the eggshell makes any difference to me…it doesn’t…but in America most of the eggs are white-shelled and brown-shelled eggs cost more because they are (inaccurately) perceived to somehow be healthier than white-shelled ones. This set me to pondering some of the differences between South Africans and their food and Americans and theirs.

I’ve been doing my grocery shopping here for several weeks now, and have, after trying various markets, settled on Checkers as my primary source of food. I go to Woolies for premium stuff, I try to get my produce at the open air markets at the Rylands and most of my meats at a couple of butcheries (I have a particular favorite for boerewors in Parklands), my “uh oh, we’re out of bread” supplies at the closest market, a Pick n Pay, and everything else at Checkers…cleaning and paper supplies, juice, milk, cheese, bread, etc. In my search for delectable things to please my husband’s palate, I have made quite a few discoveries about how South Africans eat, at least as perceived by the people who sell the food.

1) South Africans have a considerable sweet tooth! I was strolling down an aisle at the market the other day looking for a product and realized that there was an entire aisle devoted exclusively to sweets! The whole length of the aisle! I was amazed! Americans are perceived as being a sweet-loving people, but I’ve never seen anything like it in America! When you look for marshmallows in the US, for example, you have only three choices: minis, full-sized, and sometimes colored marshmallows; and there are generally only two brands to choose from: Camp Fire and the store’s generic brand (which was probably made by Camp Fire). The marshmallow selection here would just about take up the entire candy portion of an American supermarket! Multiple brands, shapes, colors, sizes, even flavors…you have more variety in marshmallows alone than Americans have in trendy coffees! And then there were the candy bars!! My goodness…such choices! I wandered the candy aisle wondering if I had died and gone to Chocoholic Heaven! But being a good little girl (who is nearly at the end of her household budget for the month) I resisted the urge to splurge and indulge my chocoholic tendencies. I get my budget account renewed tomorrow…who is kidding whom?...there is a reason I am putting off buying groceries until then!

2) South Africans are real carnivores! It is inconceivable in America to have shops that sell nothing but jerky (biltong). On my first visit here, a year ago, I was fascinated by the biltong shop in the local strip mall because something like that could never make enough profit to survive in America. Jerky, as biltong is known in America, is sold in little sealed plastic packets that are kept beside the till in convenience stores like 7-11. And it is never made from game meats, only beef, with various treatments to alter the taste (pepper, chili, teriyaki, etc.). And dried sausage? Never saw it before I came here (and I come from a family in which my father made his own venison jerky after a hunting trip, and my grandfather prided himself on his homemade sausages). The variety and quantities and quality of meats here is stunning! The beef is deliciously tender and flavorful (although I am having to relearn the names of cuts of meat because what they call a porterhouse here does not bear even a vague resemblance to a porterhouse in California), lamb is plentiful, and I have never, ever seen mutton in a market before, or game meats, for that matter. Some of the best boerewors (which is also unknown in America and a particular favorite of mine!) I have eaten here was made from game meat and purchased at a SuperSpar. South Africans seem inordinately proud of their braais, but because virtually every household in America has at least a kettle-type barbeque and cooks on it frequently, the braai, of course, was initially no big thing to me. But the meats that are to go onto those braais…what choices we have here and how wonderful they are! Marinated chickens already flattened to braai well, tasty pieces of meats already on skewers, boerewors...virtually all Americans have barbecues, but South Africans have elevated the concept almost to an artform! YUM!

3) South Africans…or at least Capetonians…have a thing about calamari that I neither share nor understand. Even if the stuff wasn’t disgusting to even contemplate eating, once in the mouth…ick!! I am astonished at the quantities of calamari served here and the creative ways people have thought of to serve it. I ordered a paella at a restaurant recently, anticipating a bed of saffron rice studded with chicken, mussels, clams, prawns, and perhaps a piece of fish or two. I got a plate full of oversalted reddish-brown goo…I couldn’t tell the mushroom chunks from the chicken bits, but the little legs sticking up from the monochromatic mass like those of a dead spider were a dead giveaway as to the identity of those little buggers. I picked at least two dozen of the nasty little things out of the rice but missed one and it ended up in my mouth…oh, yuck, it was horrid…a gritty texture and dark musky flavor that put me off the entire rest of the plate. EW! as we say in America… eeeewwwwwwwwww! To be fair, I have to admit I am not a big fan of fish in general, and so far the only one I have found here that I like is Cape Salmon (yes, I’ve tried snoek, a local favorite…too oily, too boney, too fishy tasting for me), but that is no surprise, considering that in my entire life in America, I found only four fish that I like…and I am the daughter and granddaughter of avid sportsmen and grew up eating the stuff, courtesy of Dad’s or Grandpa’s latest fishing trip. I like tuna salad, shrimp, crab, lobster, abalone, scallops, salmon, halibut, trout, and catfish…that is, at present, my full range of seafoods that I consider fit for human consumption. Calamari is fish bait. Ick!

4) What fabulous restaurants we have to choose from! Maybe it is just Cape Town, but man, I could eat out every night here…and I like to cook. For my husband’s birthday I found an authentic sushi bar and we had dinner there (prawn and salmon sushi for me, thank you) and I’m almost embarrassed to admit that the California rolls at Maz in Sea Point were better than the California rolls in California. Killer wasabe and delectable pickled ginger! I’ve been to a couple of Indian restaurants, some seafood restaurants (please, Ocean Basket, more offerings for those of us who are merely accompanying the fish-lovers), Italian, continental and quite a few others. I haven’t found a Mexican restaurant I want to try yet, though. I grew up eating Mexican food and the few so-called Mexican dishes I have had here were a grave disappointment. I’ve found a couple of Mexican restaurants but a quick perusal of the menus sent me scuttling away. Trust me on this…I have been eating Mexican food for decades…I lived in the Mexican part of town for years and frequented the local eateries where my rusty, halting Spanish was my only means of communication…Mexican cuisine does NOT include calamari! In the Gulf of California Mexican fishermen catch and sell calamari to the Japanese restaurant industry, but they do not eat it themselves! Any Mexican restaurant in South Africa that includes calamari in their offerings does not get my approval! (I brought a Mexican cookbook with me just in case.) All in all, however, I have found eating out here in Cape Town to be an unparalleled pleasure, from breakfast at a roadside farm stall to lunch at a local mall to dinner in town, it is one of the great pleasures of living here.

5) The produce is fantastic! I’m not too impressed with Fruit and Veg City…the veggies were limp, not crisp, and rubbery broccoli just doesn’t do it for me. But once I found the open air veg market at the Rylands, I’m a happy camper. My favorite food is fresh fruit, and there is a stall there that sells mangoes that must come straight from heaven. I have discovered litchis…never even heard of them before I came here and now they rank in my top ten favorite fruits. I bought the most gorgeous, red red red tomatoes this week, and beautiful crisp snap beans. The cauliflowers and cabbages are the biggest I have ever seen in my life, and my grandfather used to grow his own huge cabbages for making sauerkraut…South African cabbages dwarf anything I have ever seen in Grandpa’s garden! I’m wondering what the apparently national obsession with creamed spinach and yellow squash is, though…they show up as the standard veg with almost every restaurant meal and I gotta tell you, those two rank near the absolute bottom of my list of edible veggies…just above fried parsnips, I think. Hmmm…I think I have just come up with a way for me to whittle down a few of those extra kilos that cling to me like a frightened child…to heck with BioSlim and other quackeries, a diet of calamari, creamed spinach and mooshed up yellow squash should see me very thin in very short order!