Jardine Restaurant

19 July 2019

JARDINE RESTAURANT

1 Andringa Street, Stellenbosch

Let’s go to Jardine, the wife said. It’s been ranked at number 9 on the EatOut Awards of 2018, the wife said. It’s restaurant week and they have a special 5-course dinner, the wife said. It’ll be fun, the wife said.

Folks, we booked to stay over at a nearby hotel so we could dine at Jardine and not have to schlep all the way back to the City afterward. It wasn’t just a whim.

Suffice to say, during the dinner, after the hake course with its cold velouté, the second dish in a row that arrived on table not hot, the wife vented. This is not what I expected from a top 10 restaurant, she said. The food is decidedly average, she said. There’s no wow factor, she said. It’s not fun, she said.

This wasn’t a disastrous evening of indifferent service, wrongly served dishes or bad food. It was an evening where one wonders, yet again, why we pay so much for eating out when there is really no value in it in the sense of a truly memorable dish or, if one is very fortunate, entire meal, and, even more importantly, in this context, who the hell at Eat Out or its readers decided that Jardine belonged in the same group as Test Kitchen, La Colombe, The Greenhouse or Chef’s Warehouse? How is it humanly possible, in this company, that Jardine could achieve a 9^th place?

Opening rant over, let’s review the event in more detail.

Fortunately for us, Jardine is  only a few minutes’ walk from our hotel in Church Street, Stellenbosch, close to the Andringa Street corner with Dorp Street, in one of the old Stellenbosch buildings in that part of town that’s managed to remain intact for a couple of hundred years, though its purposes and use has changed radically. I grew up in Stellenbosch and when I was a kid this building could have been a residence but I really can’t remember. More recently the premises where Jardine is, could have been a shop.

There is no neon, or other light, to mark the restaurant, only an unlit name above the entrance, difficult to read in the dark.  We weren’t even sure that what turned out to be the front door, was an entrance. Discreet and unassuming is all very fine, but this diffidence was a bit much.

Actually, the dining space is separated into two distinct areas. One enters from Andringa Street, through double doors with forbidding metal bars (hence our hesitance to enter in the first place) into a long room with polished cement floors and a fireplace with wood burning stove at the rear, and tables on either side, with narrow banquette seating, and puffed up cushions, against the walls. The tables are covered with finely textured linen and have the usual beautiful glassware but the room feels austere and not very cosy, despite the warmth of the fire. We were seated in this area, close to the back.  There was a service island just behind me, which was bothersome to the wife.

Next door is another dining room with no fireplace but with floorboards, that seems a tad more welcoming. The kitchen is on the other side of this space.

The deal was a 5-course plat du jour menu for R340,00; or the same menu with wine pairing (the menu warns you that you get 90 ml of wine per glass) for R520,00.  As had been the case with a similar offering at Hartford House a couple of weekends ago, one has no choice of what you’ll eat; though, as is nowadays customary, the waiter did ask whether we had any allergies or specific dietary requirements. One of these days I’m gonna tell them I’m a lactose intolerant, gluten intolerant, generally intolerant, celiac vegan and see what the chef comes up with to keep me happy.

The five courses, not including the bread, were vegetarian, fish, fish, meat and dessert. The wife is not a lover of fish and the prospect of fish twice during the course of the meal was not a happy one.

We took the non-paired menu. The wife ordered a glass of Springfield Life from Stone sauvignon blanc, a wine she loves, at R70,00 for (probably) a 100 ml glassful but it could have been 90 ml too, and I started with an almost full glass of Simonsig Kaapse Vonkel at R65,00 and far better value than the glass of sauvignon blanc. The wife pointed out that three glasses of the Springfield would be R210,00 and that a bottle was R220,00, and given the small amount of wine per glass she wouldn’t be happy with less than three, so I said, let’s get the bottle. I’ll have some too, though I no longer drink wine other than bubbly.

Even when we bought a bottle, the waiter kept pouring small amounts. Perhaps it’s a default setting on the pouring arm. I agreed with the wife. This sauvignon blanc, with a heady guava rich nose and fruity taste, is quite good. So we got slightly sloshed.

The four slices of rustic bread were served on a contraption with two wooden tiers, accompanied by aioli, a roasted pumpkin seed relish and tuille-thin pork crackling. The bread was excellent with good crust and moist crumb, and I thought the relish was outstanding.

The first dish was roasted celeriac, mustard velouté, polonaise, brandied prunes and Parmesan. The dish looked good but was cold; not ice cold but probably about room temperature on a cool evening. I didn’t get much mustard flavour and the rest of the dish was nice but without anything you could call a bold flavour.

After our plates were removed from the table, we waited, and waited, and waited some more, a theme that was repeated between courses over the course of the evening. The restaurant was busy but my thinking is, if you give everyone the same five courses you should have a production line going and be able to get the dishes out tout suite. The time lapse between courses was not good.

The first fish course was steamed and lightly cured rolled hake, hake brandade, nasturtium velouté en capers. It seems that hake has made a comeback on fine dining menus, but I also think of the fish in terms of a “hake parcel” at a dodgy fish ‘n chip shop, and, unless you do something quite special with it, it’s bland and unexciting. This well cooked piece of hake was not exciting and was almost rescued by  the velouté that I quite liked but it had none of the saltiness I associate with capers that would have given the dish some zing.  The fish was, allegedly, room temperature and the velouté was slightly warmer than with the previous dish.

I still found positives in the dish where the wife was just miffed. In fact, the wife hated it and told the waiter she didn’t like it when he asked if she enjoyed the dish. There was no positive response. It was what it was and complaining wasn’t going to make a difference.

Next up: pan roasted yellowtail, zucchini and lime velouté (this chef must‘ve bought a velouté machine recently), wilted baby spinach and potato crisps. The fish was grilled perfectly and the grill flavour, combined with the stronger texture of the flesh, made for a tasty morsel when combined with the other elements, and the lime’s delicate acidity was sublime. The tiny, crisp potato discs were feather light and lovely; the last time we’d eaten anything like it, was at Jan in Nice. The wife was very happy with the yellowtail; if all fish were cooked like this, she’d be more content eating it.

Okay, we’d gotten through the fish courses, now it was time for the beef, which was aged Chalmar sirloin, with a soft herb crust, caramelised onion puree, charred onion and confit garlic. The wife wanted hers medium rare and I wanted mine rare.

We got three slices of meat each, cooked to order, with bits and bobs around them, not exactly your steak dinner. The al dente lentils supplied the textural contrast but the there was little depth of flavour here, even in the  puree or the herb crust. This was almost where you want to ask the waiter for some bottled hot sauce to help perk up a very subtle, to be kind, dish. I believe that the caramelisation on the steak should be key, and that whatever sauce you serve with it should complement but also bring some boldness to the plate. There is a fine line between subtle and bland and for me, the beef was on the wrong side of the line. What’s the point of well-cooked, boring steak?

As I’ve mentioned, we had plenty time between courses to contemplate the meal and, boy, did we. Frankly, we eat out often enough,  and at decent places, that we’ve developed a standard and a level of expectation of top end restaurants, and palates that’re sophisticated enough to help us distinguish between  what’s exceptional and what’s pedestrian and, regardless of the care and attention lavished on four out of five of tonight’s  courses, we had just an ordinary experience here tonight.

According to the cliché, we eat with our eyes first, but, dammit, then we fork the food into our mouths and if  there is a severe disconnect between look and flavour, it doesn’t matter how much ocular tastiness there was in the dish. You WANT flavours to “dance on your palate.”

But wait, let the wife share her thoughts on the subject: “Sometimes you walk into a restaurant and something about the place (let’s call it that dreaded word “vibe”) is just not right. That’s how I felt when I walked in. The restaurant is a bit bare, austere even and not inviting. I found the seating uncomfortable. Where we were seated, we were very close to a service station, kind of a wooden island in the middle of the room, where the waiters left all of the wines for the different tables in wine buckets, all the glasses for the restaurant is kept in the cupboard below and I think also some cutlery. It was incredibly annoying and distracting that the waiters kept on taking glasses out of there and brought trays of freshly washed glasses back from the kitchen and noisily stacked it back in there whilst we were trying to have a pleasant dinner and conversation. As for the food; it was boring. It all tasted ok (except for the hake dish which I disliked partly because it was served too cold; as was the celeriac dish, but the hake tasty funky and had a weird texture), it’s just that I’ve eaten it all before. Nothing new or innovative. Even the dessert was just nice. The yellowtail was the best dish of the night.”

The wife said, if the dessert didn’t redeem the previous courses, she’d  be of a mind to raise a ruckus of no mean proportions, but, phew, when the Valrhona chocolate cremeux, orange biscuit, coffee Anglaise and vanilla ice cream was served, pretty as a picture, the night was kind of saved (except that there was no discernible taste of orange to the biscuit). It was the third time in a row (Bones, Hartford House and here) where a dessert was the top dish of the dinner (well, that’s how I saw it; the wife preferred the yellowtail, which is a bit of a shocker.) The chocolate was dark, not sweet, with a rich coffee flavour, with great textural crunch throughout and a smooth, soft, perfect ice cream to bring it all together. Pity about the missing-in-action orange flavour. It’s such a classic combination with chocolate.

The bill, with two coffees to end off, came to R1221,00 with tip. Apart from the long wait between courses, which presumably is not the doing of the waiting staff, and the oddly frugal pouring of the wine, the service was good and attentive, though the waiters must‘ve sensed that our happiness-o-meter wasn’t bouncing in the red. Regarding the food, we left dissatisfied and with a modicum of regret that we’d bothered.

The important life lesson here, is: don’t go to a restaurant with high (or any) expectations simply because it’s on someone else’s top ten list.