CAUSE EFFECT COCKTAIL KITCHEN
CAPE TOWN
“Call me Awehwolf,” grins the barman, sliding over a Toast pale ale. Toast beer is made using surplus bread from bakeries and restaurants in Cape Town. So you’re not just drinking, you’re saving the world. It’s a taste of things to come.
Awehwolf ’s real name is Justin Shaw. He’s the head barman around here, and from the moment we set off on his Zambezi-rapids stream of consciousness, I can’t imagine him anywhere else.
He is like an impish bar spirit that was brewed in the vials and beakers lining the mirrored display behind him.
In fact, these glass vessels are filled with various tinctures, from cinnamon and slangbos to mushrooms and hay.
And next to the tinctures are jars of drying or rare ingredients such as wildeels (African wormwood) and saffron and baobab and love root.
Most of these are foraged by the “sackmen” (hessian sack-wearing naturalists who sell herbs and roots at the Cape Town train station) and sangomas, or collected from Sea Point Nursery and the Oranjezicht City Farm.
When we meet Justin he is designing his seasonal cocktail menu. The term “season” here does not refer to the weather but to the availability of ingredients and the intuition of his suppliers.
This summer will see the third iteration of the cocktail menu in 11 months.
“Many local bars follow international
trends but we want to evoke Cape Town and what makes it unique,” says Justin. So the drinks at Cause Effect are based on fynbos, which weaves together Cape Town’s three primary natural domains: ocean, mountain and vineyard.
It’s from the vineyard that the cocktails receive their base ingredient: brandy, strictly pot-stilled and aged for a minimum of three years. “Cape brandy is now recognised as a world leader, and we have an amazing brandy culture,” says Justin, referring to the South African braai staple, brandy and Coke, “but the two aren’t one and the same, so we have to reinterpret the story and re-educate without sounding preachy. That’s a challenge.”
It’s an ambitious mission but if the cocktails here are anything to go by, perhaps not as quixotic as it sounds.
The idea is to give patrons the cocktail equivalent of a three-course meal. Start your evening with a classic Campari spritz imbued with umeshu (a Japanese plum wine) or cold-brewed coffee and vermouth. It’s a low-alcohol, effervescent apéritif to drink while you peruse the menu. For mains, it’s all about the experiential cocktails that bring your drink to life. These are all unique concept concoctions, dreamed up from scratch by Justin and his merry mixologists. “They might have names that you can’t pronounce but not because we’re hoitytoity,” says Justin, “but because you might not have heard of something like Artemisia before.”
Here’s where you’ll spot the Cape Sugarbird cocktail, named after the bird responsible for pollinating South Africa’s national flower, the Protea, which last evolved so long ago that bees alone can’t do the trick. The brandy used is the Oude Molen XO – aged for 10 years – and it’s draped with fynbos honey, dusted in hibiscus powder, dappled with a pinch of pollen and injected with pear purée (locally sourced, of course). It’s served in a bespoke blown glass sugarbird that’s placed on a nest of hay.
The Membrane cocktail is served topped with a sugared rice disc ‘lid’ and Justin says you need two qualities to drink it: courage and patience. “Courage, because you don’t know what’s lurking under the membrane, and patience because it takes up to five minutes for the membrane to dissolve.”
Feeling adventurous? Try the threetiered cocktails, the Beetroot Brandy, the Green Cube made of mint and cucumber, the sour martini with a hot chutney foam, the emulsified avocado, or the tall moringa and eucalyptus drink that shoots out streams of Christmas spice.
And that’s before you get to the dessert cocktails, including a hot-and-cold spiced piña colada, which is set alight at the table and poured over ice cream. Not to mention the strawberry butter-scone martini made with butter-washed vodka served with scones on the side.
“When you see someone look at a cocktail or presentation that they’ve never seen before, and there’s confusion, delight, or a ‘this-is-absurd’ moment, it’s like watching a kid play,” says Awehwolf. “That’s good for us.”
Spoken like a figment of someone’s imagination.
– Ami Kapilevich
2A Park Road, MLT House, Gardens; facebook.com/ CauseEffect.Bar
“The Membrane cocktail is served with a sugared rice disc ‘lid’ and you need two qualities to drink it: courage and patience”