Our toasted sandwiches at the Gardens tea room in January. (Photo: Naomi Campbell) After decades of neglect, there’s a chance for the premises of the “Gardens tearoom” to be fixed up and relaunched as a restaurant that represents the cuisine and food traditions of the Mother City.
The lease on the premises of the Company’s Garden tearoom – as the Company’s Garden Restaurant was historically known – has been put up for auction by the City of Cape Town, a rare chance for a shrewd operator to turn the premises into something the city can be proud of once more.
For many years there was no signage on the premises, and colloquially the term “Gardens tearoom” stuck – older generations of Capetonians still call it that today.
This is not just another restaurant site. It is not merely another opportunity for various franchises to add another “shop” to their burgeoning portfolios.
The site is a shop window for foreign tourists visiting the city and for visitors from elsewhere in the country and locals. Historically, the “Gardens tearoom” has been one of the places Capetonians take their visitors to, to show off what we have to offer.
What we do not need is for a franchise to nab it for a bargain price and turn it into the kind of soulless bling palace we must endure on the Atlantic Seaboard, (“strip”) and which many of us locals avoid like a very shiny plague.
This is one venue that will not benefit from a menu of bao buns, poke bowls and plates of things that no Capetonian of a century ago would recognise, or every last trending ingredient and TikTok-forward technique.
It needs to be 100% Capetonian, a showcase of our regional ingredients and fare. Why does this need to be explained?
Yet it does.
When I visited the premises in January – to show it off to a young American visitor – I was deeply embarrassed at the state of the premises, and kept apologising to her.
We ate so-so food in a sea of chipped, worn and dirty slate slabs, some of them askew. Everything looked uncared-for, and I was astonished to learn that the lease was owned by the Madame Zingara group. We’re accustomed to something more high-flying from them.
Zingara took over the premises in 2014, before which it had been run by the same operators since the mid 1970s. Little changed in those many years, and despite any hope that the sale of the lease in 2014 to new operators might bring the necessary improvement, this clearly has not happened.
The 980-square-metre premises will be auctioned by Claremont Online Auctions.
Details: Live & Online Multiple Property Auction on Wednesday, 8 July 2026 at 12pm, live from Cape Town Stadium – The Business Lounge G, Green Point. Register to bid at onlineauctions.claremart.com.
Call Shameer Isaacs: 081 759 8302 or 021 425 8822. Email: shameer@claremart.com DM