What makes a restaurant perfect? It’s not what the restaurant guides think it is

What constitutes the ideal restaurant, the one you’ll go back to again and again? Is it the one that offers the world’s best food, on your plate, looking good enough to frame and hang on the wall? A posh nosh palace where you pay brain-squelching prices for plates of exquisite morsels that bear little resemblance to the ingredients they are made of? The one that the big restaurant guides fawn over?

Not at all. My idea of the perfect restaurant is the neighbourhood eatery where there’s a passionate chef who just wants to please you and your palate with the kind of food that makes his heart sing. And therefore yours.

The kind of chef whose reason for waking up in the morning is to cook fabulous food. And you can taste that passion in every mouthful.

This “perfect restaurant” doesn’t have a theme. It has a heart. It’s not a pizza or pasta palace. It’s not a grillhouse or a seafood specialist. It’s not Asian or Greek, Mexican or French, but it may have elements of any or all of those, if the chef just happens to love this or that dish from that particular country or cuisine.

I found my new favourite restaurant last June, when I found myself in the vicinity for a night. Then I returned to it, last Friday, which I’d promised The Foodie’s Wife I’d do soon after we returned to Cape Town.

And my heart is won over.

Why would this be? I had no idea what I’d order this time. Last June I had an abalone starter, which was delightful, and a roast duck main course, which was textbook. It was served with confit potato and a Van der Hum liqueur jus, sweetly alluring and a real spoil.

You know a restaurant has impressed you when you can remember the taste of a slice of duck and its heady sauce half a year later. But I knew I wanted to try something different this time.

So I ordered the crayfish bisque, finished with brandy and cream.

You have no idea how good this was. I didn’t want that bowl of soup to end. I was resentful when my spoon had scraped up the last morsels from every corner of the bowl. I was tempted to plead for our waiter to come back with a tureen of it and a huge empty ladle and fill my bowl up, yes please, and yes again please. It’s the kind of dish that makes you greedy. And green.

A lot of time must have gone into the rendering down of crustacean shells to achieve the intensity of that bisque. No effort must have been spared to get that level of deep, madly satisfying flavour. A five-star dish? Not nearly close enough. Start with 10 and keep going up.

So where are we? Yes, I’ve kept you waiting, I know, because I wanted to talk only about the quality of the food before painting a fuller picture.

We’re at Noop, in Paarl, right on the main road in a lovely old Victorian house with a slanted afdakkie trimmed with broekie lace, high ceilings and shutters on the windows. They were open to the night on this occasion, as it had been a hot day, and there were diners on the stoep as well as in the interior rooms. I didn’t go upstairs but there are tables up there too, and more to the rear where I sat last time.

What to order next? I could only be disappointed after that incredible bisque, surely? Last June, I’d had the farmed abalone from the specials menu. It was pan-fried crumbed abalone, supremely tender (only a knowledgeable chef practised in cooking perlemoen can pull that off), and served with creamy risotto with a lemon and garlic beurre blanc, the emulsified “white butter” sauce.

And that very dish was again on the specials menu, so it’s obviously a favourite of this chef. But he also evidently offers variations on that theme, as that day’s speciality was a seafood risotto with fish, prawns in their shells, mussels in their shells and, yes, a lemon and garlic beurre blanc.

This interested me – or my reaction to it did – because, this time, I found myself paying more attention to the risotto itself. Last time I was focused on that abalone, wishing there’d been more of it, which is not to say it was a stingy portion. There was plenty, but some things are never enough.

This is not to say the seafood garnishing the risotto was not a joy to eat. The prawns were succulent and delicious, the mussels just right, and there were lovely pieces of white fish nestling in the creamy risotto. The lemoniness was neither too strong nor too reticent. The garlic was restrained, which is right – this is seafood, not a steak.

What else might we find on the menu? For starters, wild mushroom ravioli with truffle beurre noisette, parmesan, crisp sage and suurvygie preserve; seared and tempura yellowfin tuna; Kalahari gemsbok carpaccio, and, yes, that crayfish bisque. I’m thrilled to see that it’s on the printed menu, so with luck it is always there.

There’s that duck, and Kalahari springbok loin, and deboned Karoo lamb neck, and Thai red prawn curry. Why are we making Thai red curry in Paarl, when there’s a chef who has access to a huge variety of local ingredients and food traditions? I don’t doubt that his red curry is superb – someone who cooks this well isn’t likely to mess that up. But there’s space, right there where it now says “Thai red prawn curry”, for another blow-your-mind local dish.

There’s not a lot of meat, but there is a selection of steaks, and a Wagyu burger, which the Foodie’s Wife ordered, and loved. I declined the proffered taste, given that my choices were all from the sea.

I haven’t met the chef, Zian Oosthuizen. Maybe he’s elusive. Or shy. Or, more likely, just busy in the kitchen. Cooking the food himself. Well, nobody is going to complain about that.

The website seems to suggest that this is a man whose modesty precludes him from shouting to the rafters about his food, admitting only to serving real, homely food made with love. And that’s all I want.

I admire the celebrity chefs – well, the ones whose food justifies their fame, at least – but Zian Oosthuizen is my favourite kind of chef. And I know that solely by having eaten his food.

Which means that Noop, an unpretentious restaurant in Paarl whose chef I wouldn’t recognise if he walked up to me right now, is my idea of The Perfect Restaurant. Thank you chef.

Coda

Oh, I’ve just remembered: at the end of that solo dinner at Noop last June I had Crêpes Suzette. For the first time in years. Flamed at the table. A rare treat. DM

Noop is situated at 127 Main Road, Paarl. Contact: 021 863 3925 or info@noop.co.za