Arnaldo’s reopens in
ROADS surrounding Arnaldo’s, an iconic Portuguese-style farmhouse restaurant in the no nonsense gritty industrial area of Graniteside, are a total suspension- and tyre-threatening disgrace to the former Sunshine City.
Candidly it wouldn’t normally these days be high on my list of restaurants to review, other than our newspaper group offices have recently moved to arguably the wrong side of the poverty datum line and my new desk is about 300 metres from Arnaldo’s very welcoming bar and restaurant!
Presumably my colleagues haven’t yet discovered it, because anywhere else in the world with four newspapers published spitting distance away, Arnaldo’s would be THE Press pub and filled on a hot, humid, cloudless Friday lunchtime with hard-drinking, chain-smoking cynical hacks, former hacks, wannabe hacks, public relations people and publicists; folk trying to get stuff in the papers and others trying to keep it out! and — in this part of Africa — spooks keeping their ears tuned clumsily to what the journalists are saying and hearing!
As far as I’m aware I was the only member of the Fourth Estate eating or drinking there on Friday.
I feel sure Arnaldo’s is our oldest surviving Portuguese eatery, but by Jove it’s had a checkered career. The eponymous Arnaldo Gouveia, who also ran the picaresque drinking-all-hours Portuguese Football Supporters’ Club, roughly where the Holiday Inn is now, opened Arnaldo’s in 1994 and it boomed for years.
When his native Mozambique’s prospects for peace and prosperity soared skywards and Zimbabwe’s slumped miserably, he returned to his native land. Abel and Priscilla Musoki took over the place (and Arabian Nights in Alex Park) but within a few days of winning a prestigious restaurateur’s award from our sister paper, The Standard, in 2004, Abel (a former top mine engineer) was tragically killed in a car smash.
Priscilla bravely soldiered on alone perhaps three years, then sold out to dispossessed farmers who also bought a chain of suburban hotels and other restaurants. Julie Webb, who now owns and runs Mojo’s in partnership, was group general manager.
In turn, they sold out to the Taylor family who had lost their Mtepatepa tobacco farm in the loony land reform “programme” but were successfully raising poultry at Harare South. They expanded the franchise to Kensington and all apparently went swimmingly until Kensington’s Arnaldo’s branch suddenly went bust about a year ago; we then heard Graniteside had already been shut.
So I was amazed to find almost all the staff going back to Senhor Gouveia’s days in place, including the chefs, when I called. New owner is Jose Fernandez, who apparently frequently commutes between Graniteside and Mozambique and was out of the country. Remember the place was in mothballs after the Taylors left, for about a year!
One relative staff newcomer was waiter Paul, who was at Adrienne’s, Belgravia (also recently shut) for many years; but apparently my usual half a piri-piri chicken and Portuguese “whole” boiled potatoes, and seasonal vegetables, and salad was prepared