Mountain herbs and hardbody chicken under a Wild Dog moon — this is how KZN is cooking

A Wild Dog Blood Moon offered me a Negroni to match its fiery hue. I’d been in the lounge, gazing towards the swimming pool that overlooks the expanse of the city beyond towards the sea, when my eye was arrested by a shimmering orange-red glow hovering above the skyline. It shifted slightly as if reassembling itself into a firmer, brighter orb.

I snapped out of my abstraction when I realised that Johanna Richter was handing me an orange-red cocktail of gin, vermouth and Campari, to set the tone for a long evening of fine food to come, right there in the Summerhill kitchen.

A hazy sky, the sea beyond, a blood moon rising and a sultry scarlet cocktail — this could only be Durban, the most overlooked of South Africa’s cities; a metropolis overdue for rediscovery.

The setting of my reverie is The LivingRoom at Summerhill, which is playing a key role in putting things to rights. It won’t be long before other restaurants in the region start being noticed by the local food world too — and one of them is just a little way up the coast from my moonlight reverie.

We’ll come back to The LivingRoom, but first I need to skip to the following day, when one of those rare things was to happen in a food writer’s life — something out of the blue, out of the ordinary, and divine to eat.

To say chef Alexi Kyriacou’s food is a real find is to take nothing away from chef Johannes Richter’s careful hand with extraordinary food. Alexi is the owner-chef of Abbiocco restaurant, slightly inland from the coast at Salt Rock, just north of Ballito on the North Coast. It used to be Italian but he has imposed his Greek Cypriot heritage on it, with a deceptively nonchalant hand.

A souvla lamb spit braai at his Salt Rock restaurant was a surprising highlight of a whistlestop five-day journey to KwaZulu-Natal and back. Considering that the trip included an eye-popping chef’s table at the acclaimed The LivingRoom, this is something a humble coastal chef can be seriously proud of.

Abbiocco is in one of those rural settlements typical of the Midlands Meander further inland. A row of little eclectic shops here, another there. Somebody selling oddities (we bought two secondhand filigree wrought-iron hanging baskets), a café of sorts, another nearby.

There were tables and chairs on a verandah. A double door, open, leading to who knew what. I peeked into the tiniest restaurant I’d seen in a while, with a modest kitchen alongside.

Sitting down again at our long family table, I cast my eyes left where smoke was rising. A black iron braai on legs had been lit, and a guy in an apron was attaching something to one end. He’s doing something special for us, my boet whispered. Nearby, somebody else mouthed: “Princess Caroline likes to come here when she’s in the area.”

The man returned with five long skewers packed with thick-cut marinated lamb chops. He laid them end to end along the length of the braai and slotted them into holes at the far edge. He turned a motor on and the five skewers started revolving. I watched as they turned over the flames for half an hour. Fat was being scorched in places, meat inside was turning pinkly tender. Aromas floated across to our table.

The resulting chops were sensational. Golden-crisp fat, perfectly medium rare meat, so tender, utterly delicious. If you live nearby and don’t know this man’s food, fix that, fast. If you’re far away, plan a trip there, now.

Alexi had marinated the meat overnight in — as he told me with pride — “wild mountain oreganum from Cyprus”, as well as salt, black pepper and lemon. That’s all, and it’s so perfectly Greek (Cypriot) that it reminds you why the Greeks and Greek Cypriots are famed for their amazing way with lamb.

He told me with a cheeky grin of a man who liked to say, “’n Boer maak n plan, maar ’n Griek is met die plan gebore”. (A Boer makes a plan, but a Greek is born with one.) I’m going to quote that to all my local farmer friends.

Alexi took me into his hallowed kitchen and opened the last remaining jar of the Cypriot wild mountain oreganum his dad used to grow. He handled the jar as if it were the Holy Grail. I crumbled a pinch between my fingers and smelt their aroma. My, my.

The metal barbecue is no ordinary one. It’s a souvla braai, and when I composed my face into a question, he explained that souvla is the long skewer, souvlaki the smaller one. This contraption can take five souvles (it’s the Greek plural of souvla, I looked it up) along its full length, and a whole lot (I think he said 13) of shorter, thinner souvlaki skewers across its width, in little slots. I need one of these souvla braais, soon.

Alexi told me he gets his lamb from the Free State. He finds, he said, that what we like to call Karoo lamb isn’t always that, and believes the Karoo veld doesn’t always have enough of those fragrant karoobossie leaves to keep all the little lambs satisfied. Well, the drought days are mostly gone for now, so I reckon they’re not doing too badly, but his case is an interesting one. I’m waiting to hear from my Karoo farmer friends on this matter. (Maybe when I tell them the “Griek maak ’n plan” quote.)

You sure are spoilt when you dine at Summerhill

Johannes and Johanna Richter and Christine, Johannes’s mom, own and run the place. On our previous visit, Christine, the regal matriarch, had been visiting her native Germany, and I had not realised that normally she is very much a part of your dinner experience there, serving and chatting just as much as sommelier Johanna and her son, chef Johannes.

With a slew of highly professional waiting staff as well as this dynamic family trio, you sure are spoilt when you dine at Summerhill.

This time, Johannes wanted us to experience his chef’s table, so they had set up for us at the narrow table at one end of the kitchen, and he had invited Durban journalist Wanda Hennig as well, knowing we are friends. Later on, he moved us to the dining room (literally, the LivingRoom which was his family’s living room when he was growing up in the nineties).

It’s fascinating to be right there amid the running around, the energy, the expertise, the unbridled skill, and marvel at how everyone keeps their cool, nothing is left to chance, everyone knows precisely what to do and when. You’re a fly on the kitchen wall, along which at the far end, on a high shelf, are containers of the miso and soy sauce they make themselves. 

Amid all of this, and the many hands criss-crossing each other at long prep tables, were the many courses of Johannes’ exquisite food, paired with consummate skill with wines chosen by sommelier Johanna. And Chistine too, in and out of the kitchen bearing gorgeously plated courses out and empty plates in. All of this in an environment built on two things: the sustainability of what grows nearby and can be used in cooking, and the chef’s childhood memories of his early life in KwaZulu-Natal and everything that a young palate destined for great things sniffed, tasted and savoured.

After a welcome bite of a lightly spiced bhajia (chillibite) served with rose geranium lemonade, we were brought a first course typical of Richter’s food: cauliflower. It was this brassica course, of all things, that prompted me to write down: “This dish will get you a seat at the world table.” 

The simplicity of the chosen hero ingredient shows off the essence of what he does: plays with an ordinary ingredient to find the best he can get out of it, and in the process of doing so, amaze your palate. Its prime flavours are root spices (and rose geranium, and there are “curry leaves for crunch”. Ginger, galangal and turmeric from their own garden are mixed with Midlands yoghurt for the cauliflower’s marinade.

What wine to serve with this? Surely a challenge. The wine Johanna selects is Vino PH 2023 PhD, a Grenache Blanc, Chenin Blanc and Bukketraube blend sourced from grapes grown in decomposed granite soil on Adi Badenhorst’s Kalmoesfontein in the Paardeberg area of the Swartland. There’s a steely minerality to it, which gives you a wine that pleases the palate without infringing on the delicate flavours of the cauliflower. Who would have thought: cauliflower.

Next: mabele baguette, Jerusalem artichoke and lime butter. Simple, right? A mini baguette is made with 30% mabele (sorghum) flour and served with a paste of jerusalem artichoke and sunflower seeds, finished off with popped sorghum (it looks just like popcorn) and butter aromatised with lime. Alongside were crunchy fermented sorghum crackers.

Next, purple sweet potato chevda. Sweet potatoes are roasted and made into a roll, with lots of garden herbs and young miso (made on site). Chevda? You may know it as “Bombay Mix” — the popular mix of spiced peanuts and corn, puffed rice, lentils and the like. This has been reimagined with redskin peanuts roasted with chilli, and a sweet potato crunch. I’d photographed the plating of this a little earlier… it looked kind of chocolatey, but wasn’t.

Johanna brought out Bouchard Finlayson Blanc de Mer 2024 with this course, a blend dominated by assertive Riesling, backed up by Viognier and Chardonnay in descending order. An unusual and consequently distinctive blend. Bouchard Finlayson notes, colourfully, that “striking rosewater, tangerine and orange blossom flow from the glass”. And some rather lovely wine too.

Trout aquafarmed in spring water on the Bushmans River is sashimi-cut, lightly cured and smoked in the hay of teff grains, and I wrote down one word: “Wow.” For this, Johannes and his intensely focused crew also made a rillette of the parts of trout that “did not make it to the plate”, and also on the plate you’ll find Japanese snowbow (also called snowball) turnip, juicy and mustardy as he says, served with a beurre blanc aromatised with lime leaves.

With the trout, Johanna paired Gedeelte Wines Palomino 2023, from Brakkuil farm near St Helena Bay on the West Coast, where the vineyards are “planted in the flattened sea sands filled with limestone 4km from the cold Atlantic”. Winemaker John Bouwer’s tasting notes for this Spanish varietal (used in making sherry) also promise “a complex nose dominated by minerality and tropical fruit releasing aromas of white flowers, fragrant notes of bread and balsamic tones”.

Have you ever found hardbody chicken in a high-end restaurant? This is the kind of challenge that has chef Jo smiling and rolling up his sleeves. The result is in two parts: on one side, the hardbody chicken he persuaded chicken farmer Vanessa Collocott of Blue Orange Farm to let go of, so that he could do this with it: cured slowly, it was confited in its own fat and butter, and its components include guavadilla, crispy chicken skin and chilli mayo, finished with a broth of the chicken seasoned with homemade kimchi and a beurre noisette. Opposite, you find the posh end of things: Vanessa’s “organic” chicken (Jo’s quotation marks) finished over a hibachi and lacquered with a guavadilla glaze with soy sauce solids. From the soy they make themselves, as one does.

So where are we? Oh yes, about halfway through. It’s around about here that we’re escorted to the dining room, where Christine looks after us while Johanna continues to display her wine prowess and Johannes pops in to introduce his next course.

Johanna is back, armed with a bottle of Testalonga El Bandito splattered in primary green, red and yellow. Its subtitle: Sweet Cheeks. This is a Hanepoot (aka Muscat d’Alexandrie) wine, which I believe is badly underrated, usually because for many it is just too sweet. The surprise is when you take a sip and… it’s dry to the palate. Genius. Hanepoot ought to be lauded as a star of our winemaking firmament, and here’s an example (from the Swartland, not surprisingly) that is full of the honeyed apricot notes of this distinctive grape yet has, ingeniously, been made in a dry style.

We need to skip through the rest, lest this story run away with itself even more than it already has: ukhova banana is paired with bushpig and imbuya (amaranth), the little rounds of this rare wild banana from the Zulu kingdom tasting somehow like parsnip; beautifully tender blesbok loin, rather well salted (was it a tad too much?), is served with Hluhluwe pineapple and kale (both crispy and puréed), and slow-roasted and oven-fired Midlands lamb neck paired with pumpkin and preserved summer mushrooms, a way of retaining an element of the previous season to use in wintry ways.

And it’s a wrap at this point. There were sweet notes to follow (like the delicious naartjie dish pictured above), but I think palates were spoilt by now — and we’d relished that strangely dry Testalonga hanepoot anyway — and some of us needed to be fresh for that long lunch of braaied lamb chops at Salt Rock. For which, retrace your steps to the top of this story… good night. DM