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The Foodie’s Wife and I have to go to PE (which, these days, is the abbreviation of Gqeberha) for a medical specialist’s appointment on the 7th of July. Because we have not been to the Eastern Cape city since January 2020, having steered a wide berth of it through all the phases of lockdown, we’d decided to take advantage and book dinner at the Ocean Basket on the seafront.

Die Baai is our nearest city. Gqeberha when I can finally get my tongue around it. iBhayi. The Big Smoke of the Eastern Cape. It’s a superb place; we had always bypassed it, intentionally, during so many road trips between KZN and Cape Town, choosing to pull in at Plett or Mossel Bay instead (no, not Knysna, we went off it years ago). But “PE”? Come on. What could it possibly have to offer? But we were wrong, so wrong. It’s a beautiful city full of long, wide roads lined with much greenery, a splendid beachfront with some spectacular beaches (King’s Beach especially), great shopping, walks, and a host of good restaurants, not least on the supercool Stanley Street restaurant strip. Well, it remains to be seen how many of them have survived. Our pending visit could turn out to be a shocker.

We love the Royal Delhi just off Stanley. The best curries. And we’re fussy about our curries. The lamb house speciality curry? Killer. Been to a couple of other Stanley Street places. Muse in particular. Oh and for something completely different and friendly on the pocket there’s the ramshackle This Is Eat, in the docks, where you order and pay inside at the counter and they bring you your calamari, prawns, hake or gurnard (a great fish for grilling) in polystyrene bakkies outside where you vie with eagle-eyed seagulls for your lunch. Just no liquor allowed, the place is halaal.

But mostly we go to Ocean Basket. Yes, Ocean Basket. You read that right. And oh do I miss that. I’ve missed that for a year and a half. And for six weeks I’ve been looking forward to going back, finally. For a seafood splurge. Affordable too. And I know this is a privileged moan, but it rankles, because the reasons we cannot go, and for the current shutdown of restaurants, really don’t wash.

I swear by the Ocean Basket chain; they just get it right: seafood for the masses. No massive markups aimed at making the owners stinking rich and paying for their annual holidays to the Algarve or Disneyworld with the kids. Every halaal family’s go-to restaurant too. A South African melting pot that smells of the ocean wave. 

I’ve been drooling at the thought of it for weeks. A platter groaning with prawns and calamari, maybe a piece of kingklip, spicy rice and lemony and garlicky sauces. What a treat, and what a long time to wait for it. Living as we do in a Karoo town where the only fish are frozen in a deep freeze at the supermarket, much as we love the lamb and game we are privileged to get here, we ache to have a change from it and sit in an airy space and have that platter set before us. This after having started with that splendid firecracker squid that they do so well. The weather having turned chilly, we wouldn’t be able to have a beachside table out on the terrace as usual, but there’s loads of space inside as well, and plenty of room between the tables, so we knew we’d feel safe. Until.

Given how long the lockdown measures have been in place, the owners and managers of Ocean Basket, as with all other grown-up restaurateurs who take their customers’ safety as seriously as they do that of their own families, undoubtedly know by now how to keep them safe. There is a wealth of information available about how to achieve safety in a restaurant environment, and because the industry has taken all measures very seriously and learnt the lessons it needs to learn in order to stay in business, the industry as a whole just knows what to do. They’re arguably the best example of an entity having had to adapt to the pandemic in order to survive. And some have made it through. And then.

Our booking at Ocean Basket was made before the new Level 4 came into place. Because we’re on a budget, we had booked a room at the Town Lodge nearby, keeping it very simple because we knew that we were only using the room from the time we got back after our Ocean Basket seafood splurge until the morning when we’d be up and out early to meet the doctor’s appointment. This was our thinking: skimp on the room, and splash out on the seafood; put the bulk of the budget towards that. We didn’t need anything fancy; just a bed. The evening would have been spent chatting, remembering previous visits and slowly making our way through a platter of seafood. A big platter. Or, preferably, one each. Come on, we’ve waited a long time for this. They do have platters for one, by the way. I’m not saying that’s the one I’d have chosen, but they do have them. There was lost time to make up for, missed visits to compensate for.

And then.

Now, we’ll be confined to the hotel. We still have to make the medical appointment, but we have to order supper to be delivered, and eat it at the hotel. I’ve phoned Ocean Basket and they say they can make a plan to deliver, or for me to pick up. So I gave the hotel a call. We were going to Ocean Basket, I explained, but now we have to eat at the hotel. Is there a little table and two chairs in the room (I didn’t think so but there’s no harm in asking). 

No sir, the rooms have a desk unit with one chair. Oh. Well then, would it be possible for a little table and a second chair to be brought up to the room? No, sorry. Oh. Would it be possible for you to just open the Sundowner Bar premises (we know the bar will be shuttered and not be selling liquor), just so that we can have somewhere to sit down with our takeaway dinner? You don’t even have to switch the lights on, we’ll bring candles. And our own plates and stuff; we’ll just picnic. We just don’t feel like sitting in a poky room for hours with one of us sitting up in bed and the other stuck against the wall glued to a desk, trying to fit the plate in between the service guide and the TV remotes.

No, sorry. Oh. Computer says no, sorry. Covid rules apply. It is illegal to sit down inside a closed restaurant, even if its kitchen is dark and the bar is barred up.

How many more people are confined to their hotel rooms in this way? What do they do? Must they not eat?

What did I do? I cancelled the room at the Town Lodge (and got a full refund) and made a R450-more-expensive booking of a suite at the Beach Hotel down the road. It blew the budget but what can you do. The suite has a lounge with sofas, even a table and chairs on the deck. We could wrap up in coats and scarves and set out our seafood splurge. Try to make it look like it would have at the Ocean Basket down the road. Take actual crockery and cutlery with us and a blue and white checked tablecloth; plan ahead properly, unlike some people we could mention. The Foodie’s Wife would take some candles and a lighter.

Maybe I’ll start with some whitebait. The owner of this particular Ocean Basket pioneered the addition of this to his menu, importing it from the Alboran Sea to the western end of the Mediterranean, and it’s since been rolled out elsewhere in the country. Whitebait isn’t everybody’s cup of fish, seeing as it’s eaten whole; a plateful of scores of the tiniest imaginable fish, deep-fried and crunchy, eaten bones, bowels and all. Really. But to some of us it’s a delicacy. But I’m more likely to order their firecracker squid and some calamari heads, as the ecological aspect of fishing the immature morsels we call whitebait is somewhat suspect. So I’ve talked myself out of that one.

Salads… come on. I haven’t waited a year and a half for my seafood splurge to order tomatoes and lettuce. Mind you, they have a Greek salad with calamari heads these days, and seared salmon salad.

But no. Calamari three ways, maybe. Grilled, fried and Cajun. AND Cajun. I like options that include something and. It means you get more. I’m a plate-half-full person. Actually no, delete “half”. Plate full. Yes please. But why limit myself to calamari. It’s rhetorical; no need for a question mark there. Don’t limit yourself to just calamari. This is Ocean Basket which is all about going mad, completely over the top, indulging, not holding back. What about the kingklip. That’s rhetorical too. Combos! Ocean B offers great combos. Calamari and kingklip, yes please. Prawns and calamari. Hey, what about the kingklip?

But wait, there’s more. You’ve chosen your combo. But there’s the sneakily handy “Top Ups” menu too, for sneaky plate-full diners like me who might wish to sneak something else onto my plate. Like “5 prince prawns”. Yes please! (But only five? And only prince? Do you have any queens? Only at that table over there, sir, says the imaginary waiter (look, it’s my script). If Ocean Basket were actually open. Which it won’t be, for sitdown anyway.

So there we have it. More than a year after we first started our 21-day lockdown, and convinced that we do know how to behave safely in a restaurant environment, and having full trust in grownup restaurateurs to know how to feed their patrons safely, and knowing that shutting them down will undoubtedly will lead to some of them having to shut down for good, we are nevertheless denied this small privilege. And people absolutely will lose their jobs and their income.

And here I am in 2021 writing about a restaurant I can’t go to for readers who can’t go to it. Who would have thought. It’s rhetorical. 

I know what we’ll talk about over that seafood splurge on the chilly stoep of the hotel room. The members of the Command Council, that’s who. For reasons that will be perfectly clear, we will not be drinking a toast to them. DM/TGIFood

To enquire about Tony Jackman’s book, foodSTUFF (Human & Rousseau) please email him at [email protected]

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