THE BIG 50: From truancy to trout, a deliciously accidental career

Fifty years ago this morning, I boarded a bus in High Level Road, Three Anchor Bay, and rode into town. I was nervous walking up St George’s Street, then right into Shortmarket and left into Burg, to find myself at the entrance to The Cape Times. Nervous because I was hoping to meet Shipping Editor George Young. I was 21. (“This morning” is Friday, 11 September 2026.)

David Peters, the diminutive concierge, in his smart grey uniform, smiled the cheeky smile I would come to know well, and waved me through. On my left was a row of wood-panelled offices. The third one along had a sign saying Shipping. I peered in.

George Young looked up quizzically below his mountainous eyebrows. I told him I was hoping for an interview. He pointed to the chair opposite him.

That Monday morning I had been in a building on the Foreshore, in a classroom full of kids my age there for an aptitude test to find out whether we were suitable for a career with South African Railways & Harbours. “The railways.” Would I be a tappy? I had no matric, and most adults said I had no hope. I had to do something. As we all traipsed out after the test, the adjudicator beckoned me over.

“You’re not suited to the railways,” she said. 

Why?

“You’re too clever.” 

Gee, thanks, but I have to work, lady. 

“What do you want to do?” 

I want to be a journalist. I want to write. But my mom can’t afford to send me to university. And I don’t have matric.

“Well, you must do it. You must find a way.”

Two days later, some guy in the crowd I hung out with told me about the Cape Times Shipping Editor. For some reason he thought the old boy could help. Just go there and try to see him, he said.

George was a man of mirthless smile. He wore a butterscotch-brown suit and combed his hair to cover his bald patch, like my dad did. He smelt of Vitalis and old sandwiches. Why was I here, he asked.

I told him I wanted to be a journalist but didn’t know how. I told him the SAR&H lady had told me I was too clever for that. I was good at English comprehension at school, I said. When I went to school. His eyebrows pointed at the ceiling.

I told him I used to bunk school and hang out at the docks. Board ships with a permit from an old lady at a shipping company on the Foreshore. He was leaning forward now. He’d bunked school, hung out at the docks, got into writing about ships and shipping. Forged a career at The Cape Times.

His uniformed assistant, Captain CJ Harris, a distinguished naval man who later co-authored a history of the Union Castle Line with Brian Ingpen, had retired only that morning. He had compiled the daily shipping log. George pointed to his empty desk and asked me if I would like to do that, starting Monday morning. I did, and for four years George taught me the basics of being a newspaperman.

Fine food beyond my years and station

Growing up, we’d toured the country in Dad’s Cortina GT, staying in hotels all over. We followed the xylophone to the dining room where I relished the cream of tomato soup, poached fish, roast beef or chicken, Peach Melba and a cheese board. I ate the lot.

As a kid, before the drink took him, dad had taken us on the Union Castle mailships up and down the coast between Cape Town and Durban. Dressing up for dinner. Silver service at the table. Crisp dinner rolls. Soup, fish and suprême of chicken. The cheese trolley. I developed a taste for fine food well beyond my years and station.

At the docks, the teenage truant version of me would stare at the Union Castle ship at A berth, knowing that when it slipped its moorings and drew away from the quay it would glide sedately towards Robben Island where it would point towards the open sea with a great rumble of engine power, and slowly disappear out of sight. Towards a world I yearned to see, a world beyond my reach. I’d even told George I’d tried to find the courage to stow away when boarding the big liners in Duncan Dock as a 15-year-old. Maybe I still will.

So much water has flowed under that bridge. I didn’t remain a shipping reporter – over time I knew I needed to be a broader newspaperman and writer, and ultimately I had to let George down. The bigger picture of life was my true calling as a scribe (I’ve always seen myself as that) – to write about life and the living of it, to be in touch with the human heart and understand its foibles. That was my catalyst. I would be a maven and a maverick, and one day even a newspaper going by that name would find me. And here we are.

Tony Heard, my first editor, and Wessel de Kock, my first news editor, championed me. Tony told me I had to go to night classes and get my matric before he could take me on full time, so I did, through gritted teeth. Wessel persuaded me to get newsroom – and later subs’ room – experience, and shoved me into Sunday newsroom shifts while George grumbled. Diana Powell, who had scared me at first, also came to champion me once she’d seen my reporting chops. Bless them all, how I miss these heroes who shaped me as a reporter. And as a man.

But in the background, even then, was my nascent food writing. Even in the late 1970s, I’d write an occasional restaurant review, as I did throughout the 1980s as part of the arts department crew at The Argus.

At mom’s and dad’s knee, I’d cooked this and that as a boy. When mom was working behind the record counter at CNA in Three Anchor Bay, I’d sometimes cook our supper before she came home. When I’d been with the band, Gethsemane, circa 1973-76, I was so poor that Dave, the band leader, would buy me a burger when we all pulled into the nearest Spur after a gig. He knew I couldn’t afford it.

I preferred cold crayfish mayo from The Doll House

But once I was working, from that day 50 years ago as I write, I’d allocate some funds for a dinner out with a friend or date. I was comfortable in a restaurant, knew which cutlery was for which dish (thank you, mailships), knew that I wanted my steak medium rare, hated sauces thickened with too much flour (even then), and knew what Duck Bigarade and Crayfish Thermidor were if I saw them on a menu.

But Thermidor was never my favourite as cooking it masked and altered the intrinsic flavour of the kreef — I much preferred the cold crayfish mayonnaise from The Doll House in Mouille Point, served with perfect chips and a simple tomato salad. So, yes, fussy eater, even then.

We’d often eat Chinese in those days – not takeaway, we’d go to a local Chinese eatery. There were no pizza parlours yet, though steakhouses proliferated. Hildebrand, then in town, was for a special night out, the Mount Nelson Grill Room for an even fancier spoil. We frequented steakhouses more often though – the Wooden Shoe, Buzbey, Buccaneer.

I was too young to have known Delmonico, the restaurant-du-jour of the 1930s-50s, which was the precursor to all the fancy restaurants Cape Town is famous for today. Out Blouberg way, in the ’70s, Bellinzona drew the fussy palate with its Swiss-continental fare and was credited with having introduced the Dom Pedro after then owner Danny Ferris visited Scotland and returned with an idea for a whisky-infused ice cream drink.

Faux Oscar night at the Bellinzona

In the ’80s, M-Net organised a faux “Oscars Night” at Bellinzona, sending limos to ferry arts journos there, where fake “Oscars” were dished out. I still have mine. It’s cheap painted plastic but bizarrely has not disintegrated over time. My grandson may think I won an Oscar.

Random flashes of dinner treats pop into my head: the first time I tasted scallops at the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong, trout amandine at the Settlers Inn Motel in Grahamstown, “baby beef” at the Metropole Hotel in Cape Town, and the calamari at the Chapmans Peak Hotel. Still more morsels return to mind as the palates awakes: Duck l’orange at Hildebrand, a shared Chateaubriand at the Nellie Grill Room, courgettes me feta and glorious squid at Maria’s Greek Café on Dunkley Square. Not every fine dish requires a posh nosh palace.

Slowly, incrementally, the cuisines of the Mother City’s leading restaurants shifted. Where there had been only steakhouses, seafood spots with views, Italian joints such as La Perla and Mario’s, hotel dining rooms such as the Bay Beach Hotel and the odd Chinese, the 1990s ushered in a world of food.

By 1992 I had become editor of Top of the Times in The Cape Times, and it was in those years that I also found myself on planes to London. Friends there introduced me to Thai cuisine – I remember my first Thai meal at a corner eatery in Soho and how I swooned at the exciting flavours and textures – and I wrote about it excitedly on my return.

Thai cuisine was beginning to become the global thing that it and other Asian cuisines have since become – your bao bun joint can thank Thailand for this (and China before that) – and before long two Thai restaurateurs were vying for our attention with their new Thai eateries in the city. 

Chaiporn Lekcharoensuk opened the first Wang Thai on the Foreshore, a cavernous, brightly lit space where we once held a Cape Town Press Club Christmas party, festooning the ceiling with Western Christmas streamers and Chinese lanterns. Former London restaurateur Larry Chung (who was Hong Kong Chinese, not Thai) opened Sukhothai in Hope Street (later at 50 Orange), bringing out “Chef Pon” who became a famous chef fixture on the city Asian scene for many years.

Chaiporn introduced me to Thai vegetable carving, a fascinating art. 

I spent most of the 1990s writing about restaurants in Cape Town, watching from the sidelines as they opened their doors and, often, closed again before the year was out. I shook my head in sad disquiet at the rash stupidity of so many people who would take over a space that had only been renovated a year earlier, gut it, spend a fortune on their own refurbishment, open it with fanfare and claims of glory, then have to shut it down six months later.

Too many people had too much money and no common sense.

I had more respect for a restaurant like Kaapse Tafel at the corner of Queen Victoria Street, where simple period furniture created all the veteran atmosphere needed for authentic old Cape fare. What the hell is wrong with that? Just borrow oupa’s old furniture and add some decent crockery, cutlery and napery.

Japanese cuisine also slipped into the Cape a dish or restaurant at a time, until it became virtually a part of our own cuisine, as clever chefs such as Peter Tempelhoff fused Japanese techniques and ingredients with what the Cape offers, and the extraordinary success that followed.

The likes of Luke Dale Roberts shook up the Cape dining milieu with tiny plates of wonder, and the world started noticing as tourism slowly turned Cape Town into the global drawcard it has become.

But before this, Franck Dangereux had opened La Colombe in 1996, at a lunch I attended that was the start of what is now the La Colombe Group with its monumental impact on the highest end of the Cape dining scene. It also marked the birth of the world dining destination the city would become.

Scot Kirton took over at that version of La Colombe and turned the ship towards a path of glory that seems unstoppable. If some of us can barely hope to be able to afford a lunch or dinner at its tables, we can be forgiven for being wide-eyed at its success as well as its prices.

Let’s not forget Frank Swainston

But let’s not forget another Frank – Frank Swainston, who moved to the Cape from Johannesburg in 1992. I remember the welcome lunch for him at Constantia Uitzicht, and many visits to savour his fabulous way with a pasta sauce. Frank was very fond of me – was one of the first to “see” me as a food writer – and I watched with interest when he helped arrange for Franck Dangereux (who worked with him at that point) to open his own place on the farm. La Colombe began right there, right then.

Frank without a C won many Eat Out awards when Lannice Snyman still ran them. Imagine an Italian pasta place being chosen as the restaurant of the year now? Laughable. Yet it all began its life in just such a ristorante.

Franck with a C still operates his own restaurant in Noordhoek, a humble exemplar of the very best kind of chef, in my book. All he wants to do is make wonderful food and serve it to you, just like his mentor Frank Swainston.