TURNING THE TABLES
This celebrated restaurateur is blazing a trail for SA cuisine in Amsterdam. Joburg diners recently got to taste what her chefs are serving overseas – and Janine Greenleaf was there
Margot Janse is an icon of South African cuisine. The chef, who first came to international attention during her 21 years at Franschhoek’s acclaimed Le Quartier Français, was named the first Relais & Châteaux Grande Chef in Africa in 2007 and made the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list an impressive eight times.
She hit the headlines again when she opened a new restaurant SAAM — a play on the Afrikaans word “together” and an abbreviation of SA (South Africa) AM (Amstelveen/Amsterdam) — in the Netherlands in late 2022, which introduced South African gastronomy to diners in Europe.
This month Janse, who still lives in the Western Cape and visits SAAM four times a year as co-owner and executive chef, brought the restaurant’s head chef Jasper Hermans and sous chef Rody Ponne to Johannesburg and the Western Cape for an immersive 10-day culinary experience.
“I brought some of the team to South Africa two years ago before SAAM opened but, now that they have a much better understanding of our food culture and ingredients, it was time for another visit,” says Janse.
One of the highlights was bringing SAAM to Johannesburg for two exclusive evenings, held at David Higgs’ Zioux restaurant as part of his David and Friends culinary series.
Higgs, himself an acclaimed and awarded South African chef and My Kitchen Rules judge, has known and cooked with Janse for decades.
The first course, and straight from the SAAM menu, was a miniature roosterkoek filled with a tomato and cumin smoor and topped with ginger gel and corn kernels. This was followed by a celebration of the West Coast — poached crayfish and mussels with salted apricot harissa mebos served with fermented gooseberries, seaweed and pomegranate seeds.
The following brinjal course was inspired, Janse says, by Cape Malay flavours and is a firm favourite with SAAM diners. It is coated in spices and filled with chakalaka on a base of ginger, hollandaise and topped with crunchy sorghum popcorn.
It is then that the bread course is served. Explains Janse: “If you are like me when you go out and beautiful bread is put in front of you, you eat too much and then half your stomach is filled with bread, which is bizarre because at home nobody eats a sandwich before you have your hot meal. So we serve our bread in the middle when you already have a little layer going.”
This course came about after the SAAM team visited the world acclaimed Wolfgat restaurant in Paternoster two years ago.
One of the dishes the team sampled was the melted butter with bokkoms (salted dried fish) which inspired them to make it using Dutch smoked herring.
Next up was a rare loin of blesbok served with melt-in-the-mouth pressed blesbok shoulder accompanied by traditional Dutch stamppotje (updated with the mashed potatoes folded in with pumpkin and sweet potato leaves), a jus of sour figs (suurvygie), a braaied carrot and a charred half baby gem lettuce topped with a deliciously spicy marula sambal and caramelised hacha nuts (which Janse describes as “pine nuts on steroids” and are sourced from Zimbabwe) and topped with crispy sweet potato leaves for added texture.
This magnificent meal was finished with a Van der Hum baba, a baobab mousse, stroopwafel ice cream topped with a crunchy Dutch kletskop biscuit and caramelised naartjie skin.
For head chef Hermans it was an incredible and sometimes exhausting experience — the SAAM restaurant has 42 covers while the team fed 85 people per night at Zioux: “Outside of the two amazing nights with David Higgs and his crew, Margot arranged a number of inspirational excursions for us. One was a visit to Veld and Sea with Roushanna Gray, down towards the Cape of Good Hope.
“We had a morning of coastal foraging and snorkelling, collecting beautiful produce like sea urchins, wild mussels and a variety of seaweeds. We also were fortunate enough to learn more about the history of Cape Malay cuisine with Taste Malay in Bo Kaap; particularly as Cape
Malay flavours have always been a staple of the SAAM menu.
“A third highlight was a trip to African Marmalade in Centurion, which is an organic farming concept focusing on indigenous crops. We tried various products that I’ve never seen or heard of, like jute mallow or cleome. There were others which I knew of but hadn’t considered in culinary applications, like black-eyed pea leaves and pumpkin leaves.
“Both Rody and I have returned to Amsterdam bursting with new creative ideas and we’re excited to treat our diners to more new culinary experiences when they visit us at SAAM.”