Can any single restaurant genuinely lay claim to being the best in the world? Although I enjoy lists like The World’s 50 Best and have used the Michelin Guide to find amazing meals in Paris and elsewhere, I am skeptical about the authority with which any of them can anoint a restaurant as the very best on the entire planet. Culinary fashions ebb and flow like any other, and individual taste is exactly that — the expressed preference of each and every one of us.
Still, when a tiny 20-seat locavore gem less than a two-hour drive from Cape Town was unexpectedly catapulted into fame when it was named “restaurant of the year” by the inaugural (and short-lived) World Restaurant Awards in 2019, it immediately grabbed a spot high up on my list of places I must try. What with global pandemics and just the sheer challenge of snagging a booking at such a small place with such a big, new reputation, it was not until my sister and her two daughters were visiting last year that we finally made it to Wolfgat, where chef Kobus van der Merwe takes an intensely hands-on and foraging-obsessed approach to crafting the unique little plates that make up his multi-course seasonal tasting menu.
(Van der Merwe shares my skepticism of lists and rankings. “Can there ever be such a thing as the best restaurant in the world?” he asks in an article in which he also deservedly rips into the seemingly lazy and arbitrary judging of one of South Africa’s leading ranking efforts. “Of course not,” he answers himself. “Because judging any dining experience will always remain incredibly subjective.”)
Perched quite literally on the beach, with only 20 seats clustered in tables of two and four on the stoep of a little 103-year-old fisher’s cottage overlooking the busy strand in Paternoster, Wolfgat combines the sights, sounds and smells of the ocean with the taste of many wild seaside foodstuffs featured in the dishes themselves. Every dish featured something from the sea or something that grows close to the sea. While I have had meals I would rate higher on my personal best-of list, this was definitely one of the more creative dining adventures I have enjoyed, and certainly one that paid full tribute to what can be caught and gleaned from van der Merwe’s immediate environment.
The meal opened with sourdough bread and strandveld (Afrikaans for beach scrub) snacks. The butter for the bread was flavoured with bokkom, a type of salted and dried mullet popular along the west coast of South Africa. And the snacks included an oyster, the shell of which rested charmingly on a little forest of seaside plant.
An artful little arrangement of quince, fennel, dune celery and snoek roe followed. Dune celery is among a handful of coastal indigenous edible plants enjoying a revival in wild gardens and kitchen gardens around Cape Town. Snoek, meanwhile, is an immensely popular variety of snake mackerel widely enjoyed on South African braais and, in one of my favourite snacks, smoked and made into a paté.
A colourful arrangement of whites, greens and reds brought the delicate flavour of yellowtail together with the acidity of ox-heart tomato, the sweet-sour punch of pomegranate seeds, and the crispy, salty tang of soutslaai (literally salt salad), a succulent that is also enjoying renewed interest with local chefs.
A tiny bowl of kei-apple soup was home to a few Saldhana Bay mussels and lightly wilted dune lettuce, another crispy, salty indigenous edible succulent.
Pickled fish, or piekelvis in Afrikaans, enjoys almost sacramental reverence locally. With the sea bringing both the fish and the ship-borne spices used to pickle it, piekelvis is such a staple dish, especially around the holidays, that any report of Christmas-time poor fish catches makes headline news. Van der Merwe says his dish is a tribute to South African poet and food lover C. Louis Leipoldt for whom it was a signature dish. Van der Merwe’s version sees two morsels of fish that has been cooked and then marinated for at least three three days in a masala of spices, sharing an island of yogurt along with a dollop of chutney and a sambal of cabbage and apple, and topped with peach, raw cabbage and crispy baked kiesieblaar, or malva leaf.
If the bread course introduced my nieces to their very first oyster, the final dish before dessert was my first taste of abalone, a highly prized and widely poached delicacy here in South Africa that can also be legally harvested with a permit. It was served on a smear of heerenboon, an heirloom bean variety, with mushroom and a variety of seaweed.
Dessert was a poached fig atop of a hanepoot and sweetcorn biscuit. Hanepoot is a round green grape that is one of the earliest vines planted in the Cape.
We agreed the food was novel and adventuresome, even if it all added up to somewhat less than the hype and our expectations, and probably not the best meal for that kind of money that I have ever eaten. The location was utterly charming, and the service was excellent with chef Kobus himself serving up and explaining a couple of the dishes. It was worth the wait, and the two-hour drive.