REBIRTH OF COOL
● Luke Dale Roberts, perhaps the most celebrated chef in South Africa, is mixing it up.
The man who at one point held the coveted top position on the list of South Africa’s best restaurants for six years in a row (before withdrawing from the awards) has decided to close down The Test Kitchen Carbon in Joburg, and expand the repertoire in Cape Town.
But Dale Roberts, born in the UK and trained in Switzerland, isn’t going to be lost to the City of Gold; he’ll be reopening the restaurant as The Pot Luck Club in April. Where The Test Kitchen Carbon started as a fine dining restaurant, with a set menu, The Pot Luck Club has a global tapas menu.
Dale Roberts says The Pot Luck Club is “probably a bit more fun and a little less serious”.
It’s an interesting decision, which seems to underscore the view of other restaurateurs that while Cape Town, often thronging with foreign tourists, loves nothing better than a fine dining experience, the frenetic Joburg market has less scope for this.
Dale Roberts tells the FM that he feels a three-hour fine dining experience is more suited to holidaymakers in the Cape, rather than Joburg, where “the drawn-out tasting menu experience isn’t suited to a local market”.
By contrast, “Pot Luck is drop in and grab a bite and a cocktail more in line with the tastes of the country’s commercial capital.
Which isn’t to say Joburg ought to surrender to McDonald’s and KFC. Dale Roberts’s other restaurant in Joburg, for example, is the upmarket brasserie The Shortmarket Club in Rosebank, which is often overbooked.
Dale Roberts says he isn’t ruling out doing another fine dining option in Joburg, but the popularity of The Test Kitchen Carbon swung wildly: one night it’d be full, the next it would have only 20 guests.
Cape Town, it seems, has no such problem. All three of his brands The Test Kitchen Fledgelings, The Pot Luck Club and Salon Pot Luck are still regularly buzzing with customers.
It is the last of these which is making the headlines right now. Salon Pot Luck opened this month at the Old Biscuit Mill Silo in Woodstock as a cocktail bar, with a modern take on French-inspired canapés, clever cocktails and fine wines.
It opens at 4pm every day, to catch the pre-dinner crowd, and Dale Roberts envisages the space as a “library” that guests can visit before heading upstairs to The Pot Luck Club, in the same building.
It has a special feel too, decorated in an old-world style and set in a stylish industrial space.
“The menu will be inspired by traditional French pastries, reinvented in our unique way,” says Dale Roberts. Think savoury Black Forest “gateau duck liver, vanilla, Parmesan, shortbread, dark chocolate and cherry jelly. And an “Opera” cake chicken and duck liver, porcini and coffee.
Maurice Paliaga, the designer of Salon, says: “Our initial conversations went around repurposing, recycling and using local artisans to create an experience in an old office space for five floors below The Pot Luck Club.”
They were constrained, however, by the structure of the 100-year-old Silo. “Luke felt it important that the space was broken up into various areas, and we created a general seating space backed by an elegant bar and banquette seating, with ‘love nest’-style booths. The velvet drapes, Art Deco-style stained glass, brass lamps, mid-century furnishings and Venetian plaster complete the look,” he says.
Dale Roberts describes this as a “rebirth”, though it’s more like a cleaning up of his various brands.
But given the kudos he earned from his four years as executive chef at La Colombe at the Constantia Uitsig wine estate (which culminated in it being ranked as the 12th-best restaurant in the San Pellegrino list of the world’s 50 best restaurants in 2010), every move he makes is keenly watched.