Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Dining’s a fine art, but remember to book
Cape Town joins the hi-tech world of online restaurant bookings, writes TONY JACKMAN
DiningCity in other countries, and a link for adding your restaurant.
The first Cape Town Restaurant Week from September 22 to 29 will include city and Winelands eateries, offering three courses of fine dining for R125 for lunch or R200 for dinner. There are surcharges in some instances of R50, and these carry a red star. I then asked for dinner for two on any of those dates for two people. and it gave me a list of 25 Cape Town restaurants of which one, The Roundhouse, was fully booked. A similar request, but for participating Winelands restaurants, came up with five, all available and all in Franschhoek, including Haute Cabriere and Monneaux.
Perhaps Stellenbosch and Paarl restaurateurs don’t mind if Franschhoek grabs the front seats TIDES High today . . . .3.33am, 3.50pm Tomorrow . . . . .4.08am, 4.24pm Low today . . . .9.36am, 10.01pm Tomorrow . . .10.10am, 10.37pm Spring tides . . . . . . . . . . Aug 31
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sept 16 Neap Tides . . . . . . . . . . . . Sept 8
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Sept 22 SUN/MOON Sunrise today . . . . . . . . 7.23am Sunset today . . . . . . . . . 6.18pm Moon rises today . . . . . .7.26am Moon sets tomorrow . . .7.23pm
YOU know that moment when you get to a restaurant, having made a booking three weeks earlier, and you’re met with a blank stare and a shrug, while sundry minions scatter off to see if they can squeeze an extra table between the kitchen rat run and the cloakroom swing door – and pretend it was your table all along? We’ve all been there. It shouldn’t happen, but it does, which is why any restaurant booking system needs to be flawless. It’s a contract, like buying a car. You don’t want any scratches on the bonnet or dings on the fenders.
In London there’s an excellent online restaurant booking service called Bookatable.com, which operates in seven other British cities, plus Paris and Stockholm. I discovered it by chance when wanting to make reservations in a handful of London restaurants before travelling there last November. I was sceptical arriving at the first restaurant, and then the second, wondering whether it was really true that the booking was still there and they weren’t going to look blank, shrug their shoulders and suggest we try the Nando’s round the corner.
It’s very simple: a free online restaurant reservations and table booking. You just fill in an online form, stating how many people are in your party, the specific time of the booking, and of course the date. But here’s the thing: there are loads of special offers all the time, and the service includes most of the very top and most famous restaurants in London.
We booked at Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge, right opposite Harvey Nichols. We booked at The Ledbury in Notting Hill, which last year was the top restaurant in the UK in the S Pellegrino restaurant awards (pipped this year by Blumenthal’s Dinner, as it happens), at Cheneston’s at the Milestone Hotel in South Kensington, and at Koffmann’s, also in Knightsbridge, which is the restaurant that brought Pierre Koffmann, the grandaddy of celebrity chefs (he’s guru to Gordon Ramsay) out of retirement.
Personally signed menus in hand on our last day in London, I left Koffmann’s blessing Bookatable.com for getting it right – four times. From the other side of the world. And I thought: that’s what we need in Cape Town.
Ever since then I have received regular special offers in my e-mail inbox for deals at great London restaurants, and I can’t wait for my next trip to try some of them out.
Invited to a launch function at the Mount Nelson this week for something called Diningcity.co.za and Restaurant Week, I went along with no great expectations, but left with the realisation that Diningcity.co.za seems to be almost identical to Bookatable.com. DiningCity started in the Netherlands in 1998 and has spread its tentacles to Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Milan, Rome, Vienna, Florence, Budapest, Barcelona, Madrid and Belgium. And, as well as launching this week in Cape Town, they’re also planning to move into Johannesburg and go nationwide later next year, by which one presumes they mean all of the major cities.
The Cape version covers Cape Town and the Winelands, the Garden Route and the West Coast. I counted 112 Cape Town restaurants on the site at set-up, and they included top restaurants such as 95 Keerom, Aubergine, Azure, Bizerca Bistro, good old Brad’s Grill (it just goes and goes), Cafe Roux, Chandani, Five Flies, Haiku, Jonkershuis, La Colombe, La Mouette, La Perla, Marika’s, Nobu, Planet, Reuben’s at One&Only, Savoy Cabbage, Societi Bistro and Brasserie, The Greenhouse and The Test Kitchen.
That’s an excellent start, but when I clicked on “Overview restaurant offers” it led to no list of current special deals in Cape Town restaurants, only lists of all the areas in the world where Diningcity operates. This is not good enough… if the site is set up and being promoted, they need to get some special offers on there. And good ones.
And consider this: the Brits are very good at cutting prices. Their “January Sales” are amazing ones where the entire stock of shop after High Street shop is reduced by as much as 75 percent.
On the DiningCity home page, there were five recommendations of restaurants in Cape Town, and links to Cape Town Restaurant Week, DiningCity SA on Facebook, There’s also a subscriptions link. If this works as well as the London one, you can expect e-mails several times a week offering specials. And in the case of Bookatable.com, they’re brilliant. Almost all of the top restaurants in London set some tables aside at lunch time for their special deals, often a two-course or occasionally a three-course meal with a glass of wine, or a cocktail, usually for under £25.
At Koffmann’s, for example, this gave us three courses and a glass of wine each for £24, and at that level of dining it was a singularly special deal.
There was also no skimping on the ingredients and the style of the dish. It was five-star fine dining.
That’s something to watch for: if you think the Cape participants are not delivering as well as you’d like them to, let me know at tony. jackman@inl.co.za
But also let me know if you think it’s great. It would be good to know that it’s as good a service as the London one.