Always Delicious: The Kitchen

The Kitchen

(Karen Dudley)

111 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock

021-462 2201

JUST BACK from a quick lunch at The Kitchen, caterer Karen Dudley’s new kitchen-cum-lunch-bar. Well known for her catering business, Wonderful Food, she has finally opened a place of business from which she now conducts the catering, but also sells food to the hungry passerby.

Lunch items consist of sandwiches at ZAR25.00 (made to order), a take-away salad at ZAR25.00, and a lunch plate which costs between ZAR40.00 and ZAR45.00. Items change based on what is available and what’s cooking on that particular day. Today’s sandwiches were bacon & avocado, roast chicken, melanzane & feta, honey-mustard sausage, among others. A range of fixings, from pickle to harissa, is included.

Antonio Carlucci on language

The first thing I look at is the menu; if they can’t write a menu without a mistake then the food won’t be any good.

— Antonio Carlucci, The Guardian, 5 February 2009

Update: Archive extended

I have been cleaning up some folders and came across some youthful miscellaneous pieces I thought I’d add to my archive.

There’s a trio of articles on, respectively, coffee, fish and chips, and samoosas that I wrote for Student Life in 1997 (now called SL). And there’s one on smoking, published at the now defunct World Online (Tiscali, South Africa). The Student Life articles never appeared online, while the World Online piece has disappeared, obviously due to databases suffering the vagaries of time and corporate acquisition (see http://worldonline.co.za).

No more sushi

I am no foodie (I hate that word and everybody is a goddamn foodie nowadays), no gourmand (too poor), and no cullinary snob. As I have often remarked to friends, I can move freely between the high and the low, in food and music, literature and film. Some low culture is damn low and crap, some high culture is unattainable and crap, yes, but a soft-boiled egg can be as good or even better than a souffle. But what does one do in the face of obvious high-end eating experiences, and without the moola or any chance ever really of reaching the multiple orgasms described by Nick Tosches in the land of raw fish and elsewhere.

Ribo-schmiboville

There have been some ambivalently rave reviews of swank new Riboville, a restaurant which spans a block from St. George’s Mall to Adderley street. I was taken by reviews and last night Freddie Shoulda-Known-Better and I decided to take it in.

We had no reservation, but we went early so we could finish early enough to go and watch Liverpool lose to Chelsea. Walking in at 18h35 from the mall side, it wasn’t exactly welcoming. They open for dinner at 18h30, but there were hardly any staff around, and no one at the entrance to welcome patrons – not even any signage to point the way. The size of the place obviously added to my own feeling of being a drifter in a strange place. Kitchen staff behind various counters gave us a glance, but goddammit, where was the host to show us to a table? We were early diners, yes, but if they open at 18h30 they should be ready at 18h30 certainly.

South African Pickled Fish

My laundry woman cornered me this morning, asking for a recipe for pickled fish. Easter soon. I laughed and said: “Serve bokkoms!” She did not know what they were. “Where were you born?” I asked. Grahamstown.

I explained to her what bokkoms were, and said that Jesus won’t mind bokkoms, as long as you serve fish. She laughed.

In the interest of speeding up my laundry turnaround, I found two recipes for her. So, if Easter has you worried (she complains that fish is already selling for ZAR50/kg), here are two: one from Africhef, which doesn’t first dust the fish in flour before frying, and one from an expat site, which does.

I think I’ll just get the canned variety, with its alien-like soft fish bones…

You can’t get lost in the samoosa triangle

(originally published as “‘n Moerse Samoosa” in Student Life, September 1997; to understand the racial ‘anthropology’ behind this article, first read “Fish and chips for the Soul“.)

THE TRIANGLE is geometry’s favourite form. Circles, rectangles, squares, trapezia — all are composites of triangles. And the triangle is powerful. In soccer, keeping players in inter-connected triangles is effective as attack and defence.

Some mysticism surrounds triangles. There’s Pythagoras and his hypotenuse. And there’s the Bermuda Triangle.

A triangle can be divided into smaller triangles. Take the Samoosa Triangle. Nationally, one can plot the points of a giant samoosa from Cape Town to Durban to Johannesburg. Apartheid kept the samoosa out of Vrystaat, but Euclideans say things are changing.

Fish and chips for the soul

(originally published as “Slap chips for the soul” in Student Life, April 1997)

YEARS OF observation show that white people smell their food and coloured people kick other people’s dogs. Black people wear fuzzy socks. In the 70s, brothers who sniffed their chips applied for reclassification and let sleeping dogs lie.

Thus our divided community. But these divisions are artificial. My launderer indicates that even Wit Wolwe own fuzzy socks. Whites thus should raise their ankles and express black pride. And brothers can sniff – without fear of being labelled play-for-white – AND wear fuzzy socks to matinee discos.

And thus the ubiquitous chip: whether slap or crisp, it husbands the nation’s unity. Yes, fish-an’-chips, soulfood of the nation.