“Consider it African tequila,” waitress Emma jokes with my mother – my dinner companion for the evening – as she explains to her what umqombothi is, the cloudy liquid in the ceramic cup placed before each of us. “It’s a traditional Xhosa beer that’s often quite sour, but here, chef Whyte has elevated the drink by infusing it with pineapple.”
Chef Whyte is Kieran Whyte, head chef at Curate at Ellerman House, Cape Town’s newest fine-dining experience. It’s to be found in the Wine Gallery at Ellerman House, a discreetly luxurious Relais & Châteaux boutique hotel perched hillside above Bantry Bay.
Lauded year after year by publishers like Condé Nast Traveller and Travel + Leisure as one of Africa’s best hotels, Ellerman House marries top-notch service with the best of South African art and wine. With Curate at Ellerman House, the establishment hopes to add exceptional South African cuisine to that list. And to do that, Emma expertly explains, course after course, the menu champions local-is-lekker fine dining.
“I try tell a story with each dish. We’ve got such a huge melting pot of flavours and cuisines to draw from in South Africa in order to do so,” says Whyte.
Following a diploma at culinary school Silwood, his career kicked off working for chef Peter Tempelhoff in his restaurant, The Greenhouse at Cellars-Hohenort. Seven years alongside Tempelhoff saw Whyte cut his teeth while climbing the culinary ranks to sous chef. It was a full-circle moment when, in 2021, Tempelhoff, in his capacity as culinary director of Ellerman House, invited Whyte to be head chef. Four years later he takes the helm of Curate at Ellerman House.
The local cuisines Whyte turns to are as plentiful as our official languages, and the degustation menu includes Cape Malay, Xhosa and Afrikaans influences. Even the distinctly South African monkey gland sauce, considered to have originated at Joburg’s Carlton Hotel in the 1930s, makes an appearance.
“Every component of each dish is thought out to complement, pair with, or challenge what the normal concepts of those dishes are,” he explains. Across the tasting menu’s eight courses, Whyte’s considered interpretation of well-loved South African favourites is apparent, be it a novel take on bobotie, or pap used in a surprising context.
Whether it’s the sweet, earthy flavour of sunchoke at the heart of a creamy, somewhat savoury melktert, or a koeksister given a tangy twist with the addition of salmon trout and horseradish, Whyte’s dishes champion local ingredients. Kingklip is sourced from Saldanha, yellowtail from nearby Hout Bay, and springbok and beef from further afield – Queenstown and Kuruman respectively.
The perfect pair
“I’m purposely aiming for the food to pair with the wine, because one of the biggest reasons the Wine Gallery exists is to showcase about 10,000 bottles of South African wine,” Whyte adds.
The Wine Gallery, in existence for a decade and conceptualised by architect Michael Dennett, sculptor Angus Taylor and designer Brian Steinhobel, has been renovated to accommodate the restaurant. The space’s flagship piece remains a 6m-long carbon fibre corkscrew that serves as a wine rack for 1,500 bottles.
It’s in this glass-encased, temperature-controlled cellar – with subterranean rooms that diners will be guided through in the second half of their meal – that wine ambassador Joe Beziek is in his element.
Following a degree in oenology and viticulture from Stellenbosch University, Beziek spent two years in California’s Napa Valley – it’s here he got his first taste of working in wine hospitality – before returning to South Africa last year and joining Ellerman House. He works closely alongside others on the team to handpick wines for the hotel, and for the two optional wine pairings that accompany Whyte’s menu.
“Each and every wine pairing is hand selected. It’s not just there to complement the dish; it’s there to elevate it,” he says of wines that include Karoo Hoogland’s Libra Cap Classique, Dr Goodvine’s Matters of The Head, and McFarlane’s Saturday’s Child Pinotage.
“I think the thing that will really blow people away is Curate’s Terroir Wall. There’s so much diversity in it and it’s a beautiful visual representation of the restaurant’s wines,” he says of Taylor’s compacted-earth installation. With his expert knowledge and dry sense of humour, Beziek is aptly positioned to “read” the installation’s soil, slate and shale, and to interpret for diners how such earth impacts the nose and flavours of the wines he serves.
Given his longstanding relationship with Ellerman House, Taylor served as creative director for the restaurant. While not his only installation within Curate at Ellerman House, the Terroir Wall is aesthetically one of the more engaging. One hundred copper frames, each filled with a depiction of 1m depth of soil, represent the terroir of each of the wine estates that form part of Ellerman House’s drinkable collection.
“I wanted to counterbalance the carbon fibre corkscrew with what is natural and what is here. To take the soil of our winelands, and the stone that we walk on, and the trees that grow around us and with that try to create something spectacular,” Taylor says of his updated interiors, which include a bronze pinotage vine by artist Nic Bladen, and a hematite wall behind the bar by Taylor himself.
His use of stone includes a newly-installed carpet at the restaurant entrance; many of the stones used in this – like red jasper and green quartz – repeat as individual inlays in his custom-designed tables. “If you walk through the space and look at the floors and the walls and the little blocks in the tables, all the materials used are basically regional. Making the most of that is the same as winemaking,” he explains.
The three-dimensional, holistic approach to Curate at Ellerman House’s fine-dining experience in many ways comes down to these three men. In fact, it’s the tale of three men and their baby, a fledgling restaurant intent on filling the same big shoes its namesake hotel does. Its characters – a chef, a winemaker and a sculptor – may hail from diverse backgrounds and may have forged careers from diverse passions, but theirs is a paean of love for stellar food, wine, and the South African landscape that brings them together.
Top image: The Terroir Wall at Curate at Ellerman House. Picture: Felix Studios.
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