EMBASSY FOR A THIRSTY NATION

The Vasco da Gama Taverna in Green Point started out as a notorious dive, but 50 years later ‘the Portuguese embassy’ is more family-friendly

● A few years ago, the Vasco da Gama Taverna in Cape Town’s Waterkant district was a rough place. Locals and sailors would come and drink, women weren’t allowed — there were no toilets to accommodate them — and things would get raucous.

It was a dive — a badge it wore proudly.

Today everyone is welcome, the staff are friendly and the clientele is surprisingly young. Customers relax outside, in the betting area or in the original pub itself.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing, but this year the Vasco — known affectionately as “the Portuguese embassy ”— celebrates its 50th birthday.

Over the past 30 years, pub lunches — initially a reliable source of turnover for

Vasco — became less fashionable. It didn’t help that as Cape Town became busier, parking became more difficult.

Six years ago, current co-owner Ross Cowing tells the FM, the tavern was on the verge of closing down. Talk was that developers planned to demolish the building and build a boutique hotel, which would have left the Firemans Arms as the only pub in the area.

But Cowing and his partners spoke to the developers, and bought the building instead.

“We’d been coming here for ages. It’s got some great history — it is very special,” he says. “We get lots of nostalgic visits. People who can’t believe it’s still here.”

It was built in 1860 and remains a heritage building. “If you go to the UK, there are dozens of bars that go back generations, [but] this is probably only one of a handful of local pubs like that.”

Journalist Herman Lategan has been a regular since the year it opened, 1972. From the age of eight, he went with his father who would stand at the bar till the wee hours. As a child, he’d drink Coca-Cola and eat Prego rolls.

Today Lategan still visits, usually in the late afternoons, sitting in the same chair as his late father did, while he has a drink and catches up on his work. The Vasco is a place for him to bond with his memories of his father.

The day I meet him there, he’s enjoying a glass of red wine.

He reminisces about the old days: “The men stood here at the bar counter: working-class people — fishermen, mechanics getting very drunk, it was very rough. People used to pass out, be carried out. I saw that often. It was the era of the ladies’ bar — men stank, they came off the train.”

Lategan says the pub’s proximity to the harbour and waterfront only reinforced this grimy image. “The men would come here and have some ‘rumpypumpy’ upstairs in the top rooms — they’re now offices.”

The Vasco was like other pubs in the apartheid era, he recently wrote in Daily Maverick. There was the off-sales bottle store next door, with a sign saying “NonWhites”.

While Cowing and

Bryn Ressel are the largest shareholders, former Proteas captain Graeme Smith also has a stake in the pub so, as you’d expect, it often attracts other cricketers and rugby players.

Lategan is clearly no sports junkie. One time he sat next to Springbok hooker James Dalton and read his palm, but had no idea who he was. “You think rugby and soccer fans scream the loudest, but you haven’t heard the horseracing crowd. When the horses run you can hear them screaming in the Waterfront,” he says.

Would Cowing consider the place a dive?

“I think it used to be, but that was some of the attraction

it was only around 2002 or 2003 that women started to come here,” he says.

Today, he says, it’s more orientated towards families.

The food is traditional Portuguese fare: fish, chorizo, bean trinchado, Portuguese sardines, tripe and some vegetarian dishes, with a wine list that isn’t too expensive.

Cowing says the place prides itself on its food. “Our chef is from Madeira and most of the guys in the kitchen are from Angola or Mozambique and both countries had Portuguese influence, though you can almost tell which cook is in the kitchen because it’s not always identical,” he says.

For Cowing, this is a sideline; his main business is steel, run out of a business in Elsie’s River. “The tavern is not income-generating. We are profitable, but whatever we make seems to go back into the business. I think if you want a profitable pub business it has to be your only focus, or you have to employ quite expensive and very trustworthy, passionate people.”

When he and his partners bought it, it was simply because they liked the place. “We come here because we want to come here,” he says.