Fix St James gets its own post! I was originally told about this restaurant years ago, and wanted to go because it had an awesome wine list, but never actually made it there. Over the next few years the restaurant continued to pop up on my radar, mainly on social media and I started thinking that it was a pretty awesome place – especially as it always serves some sort of tartare.
So, finally, I decided to go, and I wasn’t disappointed!
Sepia, the best restaurant in Australia in 2015. And it’s consistently awarded 3 hats. My brother has been before, but I wasn’t there to tag along, so I was trying to find any excuse to visit – and an incredibly convenient and worthy reason presented itself, so along I went with a friend.
I had spotted on their website that they had a bar area for walk ins, and I assumed that this would just be for their bar menu, but once we got there, we were seated facing the bar and had the option of choosing their full menu, so 9 course degustation it was!
But first, my “not anmitsu.” It’s a dessert that I’ve been thinking about making for a while now, but I could never bother obtaining every ingredient for every element. I knew I wanted to make my own interpretation of it, in fact, I wanted to hipsterise it. But keeping the mochi, red bean and green tea elements there was so difficult. Plus I wanted shiso leaves, but I didn’t want them to go to waste if I had no other plans for them.
What ended up happening was this:
This will probably turn into a very long post full of very random rambling things. I would put Dubai in its own post, but considering I spent less than 22 hours there, it may as well all be crammed into one!
In the last couple of weeks, I realised that I had visited a great many restaurants and cafes, so I decided to try and remember all of them, which lead to me on a mad last week scramble to match the number of places eaten with the number of days stayed – 84 – and managed to complete this quite easily. What an amazing achievement considering I’ve probably visited a low 3 digit count of places in Sydney, and high two digit in two years in Adelaide!
A last minute cafe that I had to visit was Shift Espresso Bar, who had some cool “specialty” coffees with cool names, such as Rebellion (double espresso with condensed milk and whipped cream), Hashtag (double espresso, vanilla gelato, oreo), etc. I went for the Nicaragua single origin and a Rebellion, and they were both quite nice. I’m not a fan of sweet/novelty coffees anymore, but the rebellion didn’t taste too bad at all; I got it more out of curiosity for their presentation.
It’s almost time to return home, and I feel that I have eaten through Cape Town with a valiant effort. I finally found some mindblowing places – the first being Hemelhuijs. It’s a weird name that I can barely pronounce, but I had noticed a crowd around the place during my explorations, so I decided to pop in for a visit. The decor is visibly posh, and even has a cute little deer head with leaves sprouting from its head as a piece of wall decoration. The other thing I noticed straight away was the black salt in petri dishes at every table.
I don’t feel that I did too much over the last couple of weeks – it was a lot of rewatching Person of Interest and thinking up more characters for my amazing world. I also found out that there’s a thing out there called technological singularity, and it’s scarily close to what I was doing for my cyberpunk story, at which point I discovered that I really should read Neuromancer by William Gibson because it sounds amazing!
In food news, I had my first shakshuka at Origin Artisan Roasters – it wasn’t as salty as I had imagined it, but it had a lot of flavour so I really liked it and felt it was a healthy dish:
So having visited Oranjezicht City Farm Markets, it was time to do other hipster things, like chase food trucks and find new cool places. Managed to visit Frankie Fenner Meat Merchants which is an amazing place as there’s a room full of carcasses. They specialise in meats, however on the day I went, a food truck called El Burro was also going to be there at night – so why not! It was especially enticing because they had ceviche on the menu as well.
Whenever I talk about my discoveries, the locals actually seem confused about how I come across fantastic things such farmer’s markets, food markets, talks about string theory at steampunk themed cafes, and vintage markets. Well, I seem to have a hipster sense about me.
So, it’s not surprising that I found this gem of a market in a wonderfully picturesque place that’s not too far out from the city – a place that I remember because it sounds like “orange” – Oranjezicht City Farm.
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Before I came here, I was reassuring everyone that Cape Town wasn’t that dangerous and wasn’t plagued with ebola. This is still true! It is a pain having to be so much more cautious and placing a curfew on myself so that I’m not alone outside after the sun sets, but I’m still having a lot of fun!
I am starting to get a little over high end food though, but because of how spoilt I’ve been, I continue to cringe when I receive badly prepared food – which means I have a very narrow range of places to visit that will satisfy me and not break the bank.
Having a job that takes me places is super cool, so here I am on my 5th continent visited. I had no idea what to expect in terms of costs, people, food, or anything, since my decision to visit was a very spur of the moment thing. Being the wannabe foodie that I am, I was super curious to go cafe hunting – restaurants not so much. Since I have a goal to save money, I was more interested in the mid-range food bracket than high end. Turns out there are some tasty places here!
First thing’s first – Table Mountain!
