A tour of Cape Cool
Foodies will love the mix of diverse neighbourhoods, good eats and better wine
CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA— It is day one of my visit and I’m hopping over barnacle-encrusted rocks, trying to keep my balance in a pair of flip flops, while dodging the cold waves being sucked toward me by the incoming tide.
I’ve signed up for a tour with local food forager Charles Standing, otherwise known as Cape Town’s urban hunter gatherer.
We spend our morning wandering along the beaches, plucking wild spinach, and wild dagga, happily chomping on sprigs of seaweed and soutslaai (a lettuce-like plant found on the Cape’s coast) while Standing wades into the water, searching for seaweed and sea urchins.
Afterwards, we head to the five-star Table Bay Hotel, where we’re allowed into the kitchen to watch the head chef prepare a meal from our spoils.
Cape Town’s food scene is, like everything else in South Africa’s thirdlargest city, incredibly diverse.
While no visitor should miss the opportunity to take in the view from the top of Table Mountain, the huge lump of rock visible from anywhere in the city, there’s so much more to Cape Town.
Take Bo-Kaap, the colourful neighbourhood where the streets are lined with houses painted in day-glo hues, and the scent of exotic spices wafts from every window.
Also known as the Malay Quarter, this is where Malay slaves settled after being freed.
Having been denied an education, many were illiterate, and describing the locations of homes using a numerical system proved tricky, so houses were identified by their colours instead.
An equally enjoyable afternoon is spent wandering around Woodstock, an up-and-coming area that is being transformed through art. Walls have been daubed with huge, colourful murals and artists come from all over the world to paint them.
Woodstock is also home to the Neighbourgoods Market, a bustling marketplace set up as a way of supporting the city’s smaller businesses.
We visit on a Saturday morning and the place is already packed.
Inside, food stalls sell everything from homemade preserves and fudge to delicious smoothies and herbal teas.
Outside, we find children’s toys, jewelry and leather goods that can be personalized while customers wait.
No visit here would be complete without a tour of the vineyards that surround the city.
The majority of vineyards are in Stellenbosch, a 30-minute drive from Cape Town’s centre. The town is impossibly pretty, with streets lined with clapboard bed-and-breakfasts and family-run businesses like the Eikeboom Butchery, where we gnaw on biltong (dried, cured meat) while the owner recalls how she once gave her teething daughters strips of the stuff to chew on.
Numerous companies offer guided tours of the vineyards that surround the town.
At the Simonsig Wine Estate, named after the mountain that towers over the grapevines, a waiter slices the top off a bottle of bubbly with a sword before giving us a guided tour of the site, pointing out shiny, silver fermenting tanks.
We wind up our food and wine tour of Cape Town with a trip to Woodstock’s a Madoda Braai restaurant for a traditional South African barbecue, known as a braai (pronounced bry).
It’s a wonderful way to gain insight into the beating heart of Cape Town.
Braais are an institution in South Africa — there’s even a national braai day — and we happily tuck into huge plates of beef, chicken and pork (springbok and ostrich are equally popular), eating with our hands and chatting to locals over chilled bottles of Savanna cider.
Cheers, Cape Town. Tamara Hinson is a U.K.-based writer. Her trip was sponsored by South African Airways and the South African tourist board.