As the sea stirs at the Nellie, lost ingredients have been found at The Palace

There’s movement afoot in leading hotels as heralded chefs take up residence in the kitchens of famous inns to usher in a new era in posh hotel dining. News of a triple Michelin-starred Spanish chef heading for the Mount Nelson was followed quickly by whispers that Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen was involved in ventures in not one, but two top hotels.

And there’s an odd measure of things having come full circle.

When the Palace of the Lost City opened in December 1992, the media were flown there, put up in its gilded jungle bedrooms and taken to dinner at its top restaurant, the Crystal Palace. All full of the familiar Sol Kerzner showoffiness, something that those who wrote about such things in those days knew well.

At the opening of The Palace I met and interviewed John Makin, a charming American chef who grew up in Asia, and who was the culinary magician at hand. Later, he moved to the Table Bay Hotel at Cape Town’s Waterfront, departing in 1999. A dive down Google Lane tells me he returned to the US and had celebrated stints at several restaurants before departing this coil entirely in 2016.

I remember a tasting exercise at Pier restaurant at the Waterfront in the later Nineties. Presented with salmon, I inserted my fish knife to see how well cooked it was at the centre, took a bite and said it was just how I like my fish, a little “under” in the middle. Down the other end of the table, Makin overheard and said, “I appreciate your palate.”

Which is the best way to cook fish, but only a little bit “under”. Today, I’m still trying to persuade people not to overcook their fish.

Makin was a large, smiling, courteous, kindly man, and a brilliant chef. Then he sort of disappeared from our scene, which was a pity. I had hoped he would open his own restaurant at some point. He had told me he fancied having a place in the Winelands, but it never happened. He did that in the US, however, where he owned the Bakery and Café at the Rose Cottage in Pine Mountain, Georgia.

It was Bosman’s at the Grande Roche in Paarl that soon began importing continental chefs, and an erstwhile stigma about “hotel chefs” was turned on its head.

Over time, that old stigma returned, and I have often heard people diss hotel-based restaurants in recent years. There is some understandable fuel for this attitude. In many cases, hotel restaurants try too hard to cater for whatever they believe their particular clientele wants to eat, rather than leading the way with a brave menu that might both suit their own customer base and entice others in from the outside who’ve heard that their food is extraordinary.

There have been a few stabs at this over the last 20 years or so. Not least at the One&Only, another venture of the late Sol Kerzner’s, and also at the Waterfront. At one point, Gordon Ramsay had a restaurant there, and our own hero Reuben Riffel filled the same space later. Nobu Matsuhisa has an iteration of his Nobu franchise right opposite though of course is not in situ. Terrence Ford is resident chef at ROOI, the grill room at the resort.

The late Liz McGrath was brilliant at flying the flag for the hotel-based chef. She set Peter Tempelhoff on his way with aplomb when he was executive chef at her Cellars-Hohenort Hotel, and brought in high-flying continental chefs too. She even helped him set up his own restaurant at the Waterfront, Mondiall, which he owned with Patrick Symington. Tempelhoff has flown his own flag with aplomb since then.

Let’s fly quickly to the site of the Table Bay Hotel, where mayhem prevails in the way it does on a relative building site. While the structure is still there, and the marble of the old foyer is being retained, much else is changing. Even the name: it will be the InterContinental Table Bay Hotel. Why can it not just be called after the bay it is named after, instead of becoming a mere tail end to a brand?

Out of the ashes, as it were, will rise a restaurant space called Bistrot de JAN. The name has a continental air about it. You can picture it on a characterful restaurant wall in a winding side street in some obscure French village. The JAN of the title could only be Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen, of course, and he in fact has a restaurant in Nice called Le Bistrot de JAN, in addition to his famous Restaurant JAN.

My understanding is that Le Bistrot de JAN will aim to reflect the French bistro culture. Jan himself will not run the show in-house. The ​​executive chef will be Giles Edwards, celebrated for his work at La Tête in Bree Street. The PR material describes “shaping dishes rooted in the timeless charm of classic cuisine from the south of France, reinterpreted with a distinctly South African sensibility and seasoned with imagination. The result is a menu that remains true to the JAN philosophy, a celebration of French culture infused with the vibrant spirit of Cape Town.”

But this is not all that Jan (JAN) is up to right now. Let’s fly the 1,469km from the Table Bay Hotel to Sun City, where Jan Hendrik has been a consultant for the space at the Crystal Palace at the Palace of the Lost City where John Makin cooked me that dinner all those years ago, before he became Food & Beverage guru at the Table Bay.

The concept plays with the very title of this hotel complex in interesting ways. Even at that launch of the Palace in 1992, legendary marketing guru Melanie Millin-Moore’s clear instructions to the media were that it was to be called “The Palace of the Lost City at Sun City”. Nothing less.

Now the new restaurant concept by Jan Hendrik is premised on “The Lost Ingredients at the Palace of the Lost City”. Clever. By “lost ingredients” is meant hyperlocal plants such as cleome, Jew’s Mallow, cowpea and amaranth, and heirloom corn. Such ingredients from our own African earth are appearing on menus all over now, as if our food heritage is at last catching up with the changed sociopolitical environment.

But we must not forget an earlier chef’s forays into such intensely hyperlocal cooking, Margot Janse trailblazed this kind of approach two decades earlier at Le Quartier Francais, long one of the most successful of hotel-based restaurants at the Cape. There have been others, historically — The Three Ships at Joburg’s Carlton Hotel comes to mind, as does the Van Donck Room at the Heerengracht Hotel on the Mother City’s Foreshore, which opened in 1970.

For years, however, there was one hotel-based Cape Town chef who towered above the rest: Garth Stroebel, who reigned supreme at the Mount Nelson during the 1990s. His kitchen created five-star cuisine befitting this hotel, with precision and style. Few can match him in the echelons of the scores of Cape chefs whose food I have been lucky to know.

The Nineties was also the period when the gleam dulled on the hotel’s famous Grill Room, and when we got word that the Nellie was introducing a new restaurant, we all thought it was to be a revamp of that grand old space.

But instead, they turned the former Bay Room into a restaurant, before revamping it in 2010 to become The Planet. Rudi Liebenberg had a  celebrated run as executive chef there from 2010 until 2021. In the meantime, the Grill Room space was brought back to life when Liam Tomlin and David Schneider revitalised the space as The Red Room.

Now, as we approach the tail end of 2025, the new brooms are out once more. 

Take a deep breath and get ready to dive into Amura, the hotel’s newest restaurant which will be the domain of Spanish Michelin-starred chef Ángel León, who promises “an immersive dining experience inspired by the mysterious beauty and biodiversity of the sea”. I do hope we won’t need to take goggles.

It will be his first restaurant outside of Spain, where this “Chef of the Sea”, as he has been called, is famed for his inspired work with seafood in his Andalusian restaurants, Aponiente and Alevante.

I was envisaging some kind of combination of a restaurant and an aquarium, only at this one you might be able to order one of the fish for your dinner. But then I saw the images they’ve already released to show off what looks like being one of the most opulent restaurant interiors in the city.

Having been there when this very space was being decorated for the opening of the Cape Colony in the early Nineties, and then again for its later transformation into the Planet, it’s both exciting and troubling to look back. Exciting because I’ve never lost my sense of wonder. Troubling because, well, look how much time has passed.

The press release does flesh some of it out rather well: “At the helm of Cape Town’s new restaurant is Chef Ángel León. First and foremost a humble fisherman, he has transformed the language of marine cuisine through his groundbreaking approach to sea-sourced ingredients. His visionary work has earned widespread international acclaim, including the coveted distinction of three Michelin stars for Aponiente and two for Alevante. Known for bringing rarely used ocean species like phytoplankton and sea rice to the plate, as well as uplifting the local Cadiz community, Chef Ángel León champions responsible gastronomy and is a recipient of the Michelin Green Star Award.”

They also refer to an “invisible maritime bridge” between his home of Cadiz and the old sea route of the Cape. León has said of this venture: “Our menu is an homage to this shared seafaring legacy. To the salted fish and coastal fermentations, speaking the same ancestral language. To the spices that crossed oceans, just like our forebears. To the broths, flames, vinegars, and preservation traditions that echo across both coasts. To stories that travel without borders, carried by wind and wave.”

I suspect the hand of marketing types in that quote, but it gives us an idea of what might be in store, especially once the hyperbole is removed.

Meanwhile, in Johannesburg, former Nellie chef Rudi Liebenberg has cropped up again, this time at The Westcliff, or what is now called Four Seasons The Westcliff. The PR puffery says Liebenberg will oversee a culinary shift: “From the transformation of its award-winning Flames restaurant to the unveiling of a world-class 400-seat ballroom and reimagined social spaces, this iconic property is redefining luxury dining in South Africa. With a powerhouse team — including Chef Avuyile Fumba and Executive Pastry Chef Nathan Jacobs — the Westcliff is poised to become a gastronomic destination for locals and global travellers alike.”

Everything is refined and poised in PR Land (if it’s not “nestled”). I refuse to call my beloved Mount Nelson “The Mount Nelson, a Belmond Hotel” as instructed by marketers. I just won’t. I reject such intrusions on the historical names of Cape Town institutions. It’s the Mount Nelson. Or the Nellie. And the Table Bay. 

Imagine: “The Belmond Nellie.” Thank goodness it’s not Protea. DM