LEAVING A BAD TASTE
Thinking of Manyi and the Guptas is enough to make one feel ill. But a trip to a little Japanese restaurant in Cape Town will revive the appetite
Who were the deal advisers in the Gupta family’s sale of their media assets to their praise-singer Mzwanele Manyi last week? You have to give it to those guys. Not only did they get Manyi to overpay for the assets, they also got him to do a noisy week-long road show about it.
To be fair, there isn’t actually a deal. The Guptas have had every bank in the country refusing to touch them. So they had to hand over their assets to cronies and fronts, pronto.
Enter Manyi, the man who knows so much about their power that he sent them his CV begging for a board seat at a state-owned enterprise. Manyi knows who runs SA. He went to the real president — Atul Gupta.
Sweet. Even the SA Communist Party (business is not their strong point) saw the deal for what it was. SACP secretarygeneral Blade Nzimande called it a “dummy deal” and said Manyi was the Guptas’ front.
The Guptas like to sell their praisesingers a dummy. A few months ago they received a whopping R70m refund from the SA Revenue Service. Now it emerges that the three Gupta brothers convinced Sars that they earned R1m or less per annum – three years in a row! On their modest salaries they still managed to charter private jets and throw a lavish wedding for one of their nieces at Sun City. Oops, sorry, SA taxpayers paid for that.
Feeling a bit depressed by all these shenanigans? I would suggest a drink. Or go out for a meal. Which is what I did. Invited by a colleague, off to Three Wise Monkeys in Sea Point I went. I was deeply disappointed. They don’t have a liquor licence, a whole year and a bit after they opened shop. Not good.
Besides that, though, this place is great. It is a petite space in an area where a host of small restaurants have opened up and seemed to be doing very good trade on a Thursday evening.
Inside Three Wise Monkeys you can plonk yourself down at one of the tables or sit at the bar along the window looking out on to the street. It is a very small place — some would say intimate, some would say it needs an extra square metre. The clientele is varied: couples catching up over a bowl of noodles, office workers catching a meal before going home, sole diners tucking into sashimi and a book.
The food is Japanese: sushi, ramen noodles and poke bowls (chunks of raw salmon or tuna or any other fish, really, on a bed of rice with a range of accompaniments). If one goes by the social chatter, Three Wise Monkeys has established a solid reputation for itself as one of the best poke and ramen restaurants in Sea Point.
We were famished and ordered a lot of food: sushi, sashimi, salmon poke bowl, edamame beans and prawn tempura. The fish was fresh and the poke bowl extremely tasty. I should have ordered one of their famed noodle dishes, but was keen to sample the things I love. And they were excellent.
Warning: Don’t order everything all at once. These guys don’t seem to understand the concept of staggering the orders — the starter and main portions arrived very quickly after we ordered. And all at the same time! It made for a wonderful feast, of course, but the tables are small.
This restaurant could become great. They need to sort out the liquor licence issue. Otherwise, the neighbourhood is vibey and the food is really fantastic.
On their modest salaries they still managed to charter private jets and throw a lavish wedding for one of their nieces at Sun City
Three Wise Monkeys ★★★½
77 Regent Road Sea Point, Cape Town Tel: (021) 433-1837
★★★★★ Mcebisi Jonas ★★★★ Excellent ★★★ Good ★★ Poor ★ The Guptas