This was the skeleton of what we now know and love as Victoria Wharf, the shopping mall tranche of what was then starting to become the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. I was editor of Top of the Times, a Friday section of the then highly respected Cape Times, and we were breaking food stories all over the place under the editorship of the late, great Kosie Viviers and deputy editor Gordon Kling, who was my line manager and played a key role in making Top of the Times the good read that it was.

Sometimes we are able, in life, to draw a line from what was then to what is now, and this is one such occasion, with a soupçon of serendipity.

On the upper level of Victoria Wharf, on the side facing the harbour and what is now home to the giant Ferris wheel, was a restaurant called Mortons on the Wharf, which became a staple of the early years of the ever-burgeoning Waterfront, and where you could dig deep into lovely steaming pots of Jambalaya, Gumbo and other American seafood delights of the Creole and Cajun persuasion. These were the days when restaurants at the Waterfront were still growing a regular clientele. In the years that followed, some of the restaurants at the docks did so well that the rest of the restaurant scene in the Mother City hit back with a tongue-in-cheek campaign under the slogan “Duck the Fox”, which had nothing to do with ducking foxes.

In the early days we were invited to dinner at Mortons on the Wharf with the owners, Hugh von Zahn and Rudi Minnaar, and enjoyed one of those meals that still brings a smile 25 years or more later. I can picture us at a window table with much conviviality and being served by a young man and a blonde-haired young woman who had a special flair about them. The young man, I now know, was Peter Weetman, who became one of the Cape’s most accomplished restaurateurs even though he will readily tell you that he cannot, in his own right, so much as boil an egg. Minnaar and Von Zahn were generous of spirit, and part of their ethos was to encourage talent when they spotted it; to give them a leg up so to speak.

The young woman was Tammy Botbyl, and Von Zahn and Minnaar took them under their wing with the four of them becoming partners in Bertha’s, a large and vigorously popular restaurant on the wharf in Simon’s Town which operated for many years. Weetman and Botbyl went on to operate Societi Bistro and Jonkershuis (Groot Constantia) respectively, being partners in one another’s businesses.

Peter’s original Societi (following the Bertha’s years) was at the Waterfront in Cape Town, close to where the story had all begun at Morton’s all those years earlier. By the time I caught up with Peter again (we’d been living in the UK), he was about to move Societi to Gardens, near the Labia Theatre cinema, and he recently celebrated 10 highly successful years in that spot. I happily admit to a bias, Societi at that address having become our home from home, which it remains, and where I am even a regular dish (sorry) on the menu. If you order me in winter you will be presented with a fall-apart lamb shank. I am, they say, very tender, and who am I to argue.

Since we live in the deep Karoo these days, we no longer get to Societi more than once or twice a year, if that, and our mad rush to Cape Town and back this past weekend for our daughter Rebecca’s baby shower, at the splendid Chart Farm in Wynberg among the roses and vines, was too fleeting to allow a visit to Societi.

But Rebecca had heard about Bones, a new restaurant, bar, deli et al at The Palms in now-trendy Woodstock — will the Cape ever get over the mindless need to be trendy? — and had booked us in there as something to consider for the new Thank God It’s Friday food pages and newsletter in Daily Maverick, aka My New Food Gig.

On eyeing the happily brief menu at Bones (the longer the menu, the more the need to worry), I remarked to the table, “This reminds me of the Societi menu.” Not the dishes as such, but the mix of not too many dishes that please many palates, and a distinct lack of pretension about it. It transpired — we only discovered hours later as we were leaving — that Bones is the new venture by none other than Rudi Minnaar, one of the original two partners at Mortons on the Wharf who had set up Weetman and Botbyl at Bertha’s way back when we and they were all young.

And that makes for a very happy full circle; it’s been rewarding, from a distance, to see Peter Weetman’s own development over the years, and I have always admired the way he learnt a key lesson from Minnaar and Von Zahn, Peter himself encouraging a number of his own staff down the years, and bringing them on board as partners or helping them set up their own restaurants. Not many restaurateurs bother to do that.

As an aside, before Weetman took over the present Societi premises 10 years ago, it had most recently been home to Sukhothai, owned by Larry Chung, who though he hailed from Hong Kong via London had become very good at creating and running Thai restaurants, first in London and then at the Cape.

The house at 50 Orange Street had a reputation for being haunted by the ghosts of the two darkly dressed women who had lived there for many years, with their black Citroen (as I recall) parked in the street outside, virtually a landmark for City Bowl denizens travelling between the city and home. In his early days there, Larry told me about the night he’d been alone in the house with all doors locked, when a door would open, which he’d close, and which would open again; and no breeze. Ever respectful of matters spiritual, he had made a shrine to their spirits on a window sill. From then on he no longer felt disapproved of.

Peter Weetman, in his own early days there, and after I had told him the ghost story, had “a little chat” with the old dears one night, telling them that he was no threat to them and respected their presence. Before Weetman and Chung, 50 Orange Street had seen restaurant after bar after restaurant close after not too long in business. One wonders if they’d been seen off.

Larry Chung, in his time there, had brought out, from Thailand, a Thai man called Pon, and he (like Minnaar and Von Zahn) later set Pon up as a partner in Chef Pon’s Asian Kitchen. After many years in business, the former Chef Pon’s is now only a memory of many happy Asian meals below the mountain. I traced Larry recently back to London, though he will, he says, still visit Cape Town, and may even return.

It was Larry Chung, in an aside from an aside, who once made me eat a Thousand-Year Egg. Not made me as such, but when you’re at a table with many Chinese people at a properly Chinese restaurant in (as I recall) Paarden Eiland, for Sunday lunch as their guest, and a black, gelatinous and evidently ancient egg is placed in front of you, it would not be polite to say “no thank you, I’ll have the chop suey”. Which in any event is American-Chinese.

Though called a Thousand-Year Egg — or sometimes a Century Egg, or Hundred-Year Egg, among other names — it is in fact cured in salt, ash, clay and other preservatives for some weeks, and not for years as the name suggests.

But look at one, in its black, deathly ugliness, and you sure could believe it had been preserved for centuries and more. You might even wonder if it was ever on the menu at 50 Orange Street, back in the days when two wizened old dears wore black and scarcely ever ventured out in the long, low black car. For the record, a Thousand-Year Egg is among the least appetising things you are ever likely to be tempted not to eat. And the flavour, though not “off” as such, was, in the end, simply nothing to write home about. I’d wager that even I taste better, if only in winter. DM