Wolfgat at Taste of London: What to expect from the tiny 'restaurant of the year' as it touches down in London

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Two hours north of Cape Town is Paternoster, a village of white houses and deep-coloured fishing boats that juts out into the Atlantic. Fewer than 2,000 people live there — it is not the place that you’d expect the star of this year’s Taste of London festival to call home.

But it is. That star is a 20-cover seafood restaurant, Wolfgat, which had “a complete shock” at this year’s inaugural World Restaurant Awards when it won Restaurant of the Year.

With the help of Ron Zacapa rum, Taste persuaded Wolfgat’s six staff to close up on the coast for a few days, flying them 6,000 miles so that Londoners can take a bite of the world’s best restaurant. For all but chef-patron Kobus van der Merwe, it was the first time they had been on a plane, let alone left South Africa.

“I, er, spent most of it working in a call centre in Chiswick,” the chef says of his first London visit, a gap year nearly two decades ago. “I wasn’t really doing anything culinary at all.”

The way 39-year-old van der Merwe tells it, he spent a long time not doing anything culinary at all, though he was clearly raised to love food — “we’re a family that discusses dinner plans around the lunch table” — and his grandfather farmed close to Botswana, where the family hunted and foraged for their food.

“I grew up finding it a foreign concept that you could buy meat, you know,” he says. “I didn’t realise that city children get their version, like, from a grocer or a butcher.”

Life's a beach: the view from the Paternoster restaurant 

His maternal grandmother, who never followed recipes, was another great influence. “We collected seaweed on the beach and dried it on newspaper in the backyard, and then she cooked a jelly from it that she flavoured with sweet wine and pepper. I’ve made a version of it at the restaurant.”

After a stint as a journalist in his twenties, first reviewing classical concerts then writing up restaurants, he decided that office life didn’t fit and “I actually moved, aged 29, back with my parents”. He makes a face. “I mean, I love them. And we have a good relationship. But it’s different when you move back home.”

It happened after his parents bought a local store selling everything “from jam to postcards”, with a small tea garden attached “that did a terrible breakfast, and fish and chips from frozen, straight in the deep fryer”.

He began helping out, and over a slow decade perfected the food that’s being served at Taste this week. In Paternoster, everything plated comes from the land or water nearby. “We describe our cooking as Strandveld food. It’s Afrikaans — if you directly translate it, it means ‘beach and field’.”

Taste of London returns to Regent's Park for 2019

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Unsurprisingly, much of what’s on their menu isn’t available over here but that’s all part of the fun, van der Merwe says: “We’re certainly going to try to recreate it, even though we are a little bit like fish out of water, being plonked in the middle of London. We’ve managed to find quite a few ingredients that are, if not exactly the same, quite similar to some things we use. And we’re bringing our classic dishes.”

Which are? “I think the most iconic would be our bread course, which is served with a skillet of melted butter infused with dried fish.

“Whenever we try to get rid of it our regular guests get upset, so now we just keep it on.

“We’ve also got oysters, which are very iconic for us on the west coast as well. We’re going to serve them with lychee granita.”

Elsewhere will be mussels, venison with seaweed and “pickled fish, which is like an Afrikaans and Cape Malay traditional dish with a mild curry flavour. We put our spin on the spice by adding wild garlic.” Even without the exact ingredients, he says, much of their signature style comes from cooking very simply, using a handful of ingredients at a time.

“We’re certainly not the best or number one in the world,” insists the chef. “We just want to give a glimpse of what we’re about.”

The Residence at Taste of London, Regent’s Park, from today until June 23, is presented by Ron Zacapa rum. Tickets are still available from london.tastefestivals.com

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