The Pink Lady shows a little leg as a new era dawns

Ghosts may roam these halls. Is that the scent of Winston Churchill’s Floris No. 127 eau de cologne that mysteriously wafted past your nose; not the “Sir” Winston he would become, but the handsome young war correspondent of 1899-1902 who filed reports from here to the Morning Post? Did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who once scandalised these corridors with rumours of a seance in a bedroom, lean against that wall, and is that the whiff of his shag-cut tobacco in your nostrils?

This is the Mount Nelson, the grand old dame of Cape Town, the powder-puff doyenne of gracious colonial hotels, comfortable in her status at the pinnacle of Cape Town society, hidden from sight as she is to the passing riff raff. 

Ah, the Nellie. For those who know and love her she’s a grand old Pink Lady at the heart of the Mother City, right at its centre. The Mount Nelson, connected to the sea and the passing passenger liners as much as she is to the colonial times out of which she was born; and who has been pink ever since she was painted so to celebrate the end of the First World War. The Pink Lady who has stood here since the very last year of the 19th century, 1899. 

To understand this connection, roam her corridors and admire the hundreds of paintings of passenger liners (Castle Line, and later Union Castle after the merger) that she has inherited in her century and a quarter, and which she holds to her voluminous breast as a matriarch might clutch to her bosom the sepia photograph of the son she longs to see once more. Arundel Castle, Armadale Castle. Edinburgh Castle, which brought my parents to South Africa from Yorkshire via Southampton in December 1952. Here is Windsor Castle, but look, here is another one, and another, for there were several incarnations of the grand passenger ship, the final iteration of which cruised out of Duncan Dock in 1977. I know — I was on the quayside watching her, tears in my 22-year-old eyes.

Here is a photograph of the Central Hall of the Mount Nelson in its previous guise in 1890, when the old girl was purchased by shipping magnate Sir Donald Currie, whose dream was “to build a hotel as stylish and elegant as those in London, to cater exclusively for the Castle Line’s well-heeled First Class passengers”, to quote the Belmond Hotel’s website. In every corridor along the expansive floors, vessel upon vessel is immortalised. In an unexpected connection, the portraits of the venerable old ships are punctuated with watercolours of Cape Town scenes by former Cape Times cartoonist Tony Grogan, a respected colleague for many years.

The Mount Nelson, where war correspondents billeted in posh style during the Anglo-Boer War, when this hotel was still in its infancy. Modern Capetonions may step into these hallowed portals (for once, the term has meaning) having saved up for “the tea”, while others have been here for a banquet they felt thrilled to have been invited to. The better heeled from Bishopscourt or Bantry Bay may be more familiar with her than those less financially blessed, but 125 years after the Pink Lady first opened her doors and invited us in to gawp and sigh, in 2024, most of the heads in her beds are those of rich tourists who pay dollar prices that would make most Capetonians weep. (A little birdie told me that there’s a kinder rand price for locals, but don’t say I told you so.)

The Pink Lady is pivotal to the city yet strangely remote from the highrises just down there beyond those trees. At the upper end of Government Avenue in the Company’s Garden, we pass by her fine pink portal between home and place of work while elegant people in posh cars purr up her driveway to disappear out of sight around the corner. But we cannot see her from Orange Street. We may wonder what magic and mysteries lie here, beyond that bend? There must be thousands upon thousands of Capetonians who have never set foot in her resplendent halls and bedrooms, and never will.

I’ve been lucky, very lucky. Journalists get invited to things at the Nellie. I remember launches and announcements to which shipping reporters were invited in the Mount Nelson’s function rooms in the seventies. Weddings on the verandah; two come to mind. The Adele Searll 100 club lunches in the ballroom to which I was often invited in the nineties, usually the only man. I see they’re still going, although obviously without their founder. In the late nineties there was a fabulous ballroom banquet at which I was introduced to a then elderly Dr Christiaan Barnard, whose warm greeting astonished me; as I was leaving singers Lesley Rae Dowling and Coenie de Villiers came over to chat about the interviews I’d conducted with them in the eighties.

In the eighties it had become an occasional treat to book a booth table at the Grill Room. This was a dinner-dance venue with a band playing and trolleys being wheeled to tables. Flambé crêpes Suzette here, filet mignon there; the dessert trolley following a while later. Waiters in penguin suits, menus in French.

They shut the Grill Room somewhere in the nineties and I did not set foot in it again for more than two decades, possibly close to three. The old Bay Room was turned into the Cape Colony restaurant, with design by Graham Viney, who at that point gave the hotel reception rooms and bedrooms a look that was grand and full of Sanderson, as I recall, if perhaps too chintzy for current times. Garth Stroebel was still executive chef, a true great of the Cape dining scene, whom I miss.

Now, a groovy Portuguese GM, Thiago Sarmento, has swooped in to set a new course for the old dear, and a dashingly handsome refurb has remade her halls for a new age. Even the staff uniforms are of a different order. The gentlemen are suited and hatted in sassy style, so much panache, while smart pink suits bring the requisite pink into reception couture.

This time I am here to meet another executive chef, a young man whose appointment has turned heads. Not because it was obviously a powerhouse choice, or a known name whose incumbency would clearly be one to watch, but because he was, relatively speaking, an unknown quantity, brought in from abroad.

The Mount Nelson has an executive chef who has yet to prove himself. This, in a chef’s position at the top of the heap. At the Cape, the executive chef of the Nellie has long been the cream of the crop; this was so long before the celebrity chef culture reset the Cape dining scene. There are high expectations having been set by forebears such as Stroebel, Rudi Liebenberg (under whose tenure Planet became the hotel’s fine dining restaurant), and George Jardine, whose tenure at the Nellie was unusually short.

New executive chef Luke Barry is not new to the Cape, it turns out; only at this level of the local industry. He is SA Chefs’ Academy trained and worked at the One&Only Hotel at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront before heading for China 12 years ago when his chef wife Erica Barry was headhunted from the One&Only to helm the kitchen at the Hilton in Shenzhen. 

After two years as head chef in China, he moved to Hong Kong and ran the culinary programme at a five star hotel group as Group Executive Chef. Six years followed as corporate executive chef at Black Sheep Restaurants, a group in Hong Kong, which he says is “very niche in terms of conceptualisation” — they have 40-plus restaurants ranging from casual through to Michelin starred, and he oversaw the culinary programme throughout a large number of their restaurants.

Luke was head hunted to the Middle East where he was the culinary director for a 75-year-old company — an institution in the Middle East where he operated a portfolio of restaurants, banquets, ballrooms and special projects such at the Formula One Grand Prix, and many more. He then headed back to Hong Kong to help open a Singapore-based company that was expanding into Hong Kong, as culinary director.

How did he end up back in Cape Town, and at this stellar level? After 12 years away, he told city chef luminary Liam Tomlin that he was looking to return to Cape Town but that it “needs to make sense”, and sent him his CV, and after a few months and the requisite interviewing process, he found himself offered the Pink Lady’s top chef job. And with that, things fall into place.

One thing that is obvious is that the Mount Nelson is not going to fill this kind of position lightly. But what can we expect of this relatively unknown quantity, at least in context of Cape Town restaurants? The key is his management skills. For Formula One stints in Saudi Arabia he had charge of 600 chefs at a time, so running the food operation of the Nellie is far less daunting for him than it would be to many chefs. 

Chef Luke has a new menu at the Oasis, and when I pitched up to interview him for this story, he served me lunch on the Verandah, but the dishes were from the Oasis menu, which was booked out that day for a private event. Despite this, chef Luke courteously joined me for lunch. And he is a very curious, considered man.

So I’m a tad taken aback when he says, “I’m going to be quite disruptive.” But what he’s referring to is that gap, as it were, between the Pink Lady and her subjects elsewhere in the city. 

What might be in store? For one, he wants to connect the hotel and its food operation more directly to the Mother City over which the Pink Lady rules in her laconic way. While the Verandah will be the new fine dining venue under his management, the fountain area that it faces will become a restaurant, right in the garden. 

This will be called the Fountain by Planet Bar, and will feature “a kitchen in the garden”, with Mediterranean fare such as antipasti, warm sardines, cannelloni, pizza (yes, pizza at the Nellie), and “limoncellomisu” all targeting a younger crowd of Capetonians. 

This seems to answer the peculiar matter of the Nellie’s strange isolation from the city — the many thousands of Capetonians who never know the hotel and its charms. Obviously this will relate to those who can afford the aforementioned charms, but it’s a bold shift nevertheless.

There’s more. Over in the far corner, if you turn left at the fountain when entering the gardens from the Verandah, is the Oasis, a veteran of bright and breezy dining at the hotel and its breakfast room. As of right now, you can go to the Oasis on Saturdays for… a braai. Seriously, in summer, now, you can enjoy a braai at the Nellie. What must the old pink dame make of it? Pink in the face with perplexity, one imagines. I can imagine her thinking, “Who ARE these people?” Oh, and a pool menu, but that will be for guests only, no doubt.

Meanwhile, Luke Barry suggests dishes he would like me to taste from the new Oasis menu. He describes the Oasis as “elevated casual with farm to table seasonality inspired by its beautiful garden surroundings”, and soon I’m served a fresher-than-clear-water burrata salad washed with olive oil and lots of black pepper. He’s keen for me to have his striking take on beef tartare. It’s very special. Pickled mustard seeds. A smoked emulsion of egg and olive oil, achieved by dropping charcoal in the emulsion. The white adornment is a sago crisp infused with lime zest. The chervil garnish is fresh from the garden. I write down: “It’s the best tartare ever.” 

A bowl of smoked Gordal olives arrives, from the new Planet Bar menu of “elevated bar snacks, globally inspired, based on my travels” — the likes of “beautiful hand picked golden Namibian crab on potato rosti”, and yoghurt vanilla and olive oil loaf cake. Cocktails will be classic. They’re used in a dirty martini with smoky brine. He tells me the new Bar menu will include a bar snack based on fish paste on toast — toasted sourdough, whipped ricotta, anchovy fillets, lemon zest and parsley oil. Gosh — you may want to plan a drink at the bar for that.

I’m served a splendid springbok loin main course, with baby carrots, mustard seeds, braised pearl onions and crispy kale. Here’s a fried croquette filled with braised beef shin. Salt-baked baby potatoes and crushed and fried with fresh herbs and finished with garlic and extra virgin olive oil. These are among the most delicious potatoes I have ever eaten.

It is a happy man who is served the best potatoes he has ever eaten, and this man needs a short walk. Luckily, after lunch Luke gives me a tour of his vegetable and herb gardens, both existing ones and an area outside the Oasis that will become a second, larger vegetable and herb garden (there’s even a mixology garden now, something Sir Donald could never have imagined when the gardens were planted in the 1890s), which means that 25 years after first moving to Cape Town in 1969 I got to walk through parts of those gardens for the first time.

Soon, the Verandah, which we traipse through again as I leave, will be “fine dining” and will “hero South African flavours and cooking techniques”. This is expected in December, when “a lot of it will be kissed by smoke”, he says, intriguingly. He adds, for my happy ears, “The last thing you will see in my food is foams and things like that.”

Finally, there are Luke Barry’s chef’s tables, right in the kitchen. But that is something I will be experiencing this weekend, so come back here next week for Part 2 of my little ode to the wonderful old Nellie. DM

Read more about the fascinating history of the Mount Nelson.