Ben's on the Beach

 24 April 2022

 

Ben’s on the Beach

142 Beach Road, Strand

 

Ben’s on the Beach, if you close your eyes and whisper  the words, sounds seductively like Benz on the beach and prompts thoughts of a German luxury limousine majestically purring along on the hard sand at the water’s edge, and then you want to carry these meditations  through to an optimistic expectation of the culinary marvels the restaurant will serve.  Sad to say, when you eat at Ben’s it’s more like Beetle on the beach, and a rust bucket at that.

 

Ag no man, it’s not that bad but it really isn’t all that good, either.

 

Ben’s on the Beach has been a fixture on Beach Road, Strand for what seems like aeons though the wife and I hadn’t eaten there in probably 10 years, perhaps more, and think there might have been some decorating changes over the years. The current iteration has a broad front section with large windows facing the beach, across the street,  with the tables spaced well apart, but the deeper interior is the much more luxurious part of the restaurant with banquette booths as well as stand-alone tables, and a kinda old school elegance. I reckon, if one were sitting there, you’d feel like a Powerball winner out on the tiles with no budgetary restrictions.

 

The downer is that the quality of the cooking doesn’t quite live up to the standard of the furnishings.

 

The wife and I brought my 88-yrar-old mother and my 93- year-old aunt here for Sunday lunch. For various, reasons, the plan didn’t quite come together, but for now, I’ll stick to culinary matters.

 

Ben’s doesn’t offer fine dining and, in a way, is an upskilled  steakhouse, comparable to, say, The Hussar chain, rather than competition for the likes of Petite Colombe.  It’s the kind of eatery that offers relatively simple, unsophisticated fare and one can only hope that the food is prepared with the kind of care and attention that elevates simplicity into culinary bliss. 

 

Bitterballen and skilpadjies are the most interesting things on the list of appetizers, and the mains offers titillating “international” exoticism with Turkish style chicken, Tuscan pork belly, Mauritian seafood casserole, Zanzibar piri-piri chicken, Kentucky “steak”(sic), Hollandse biefstuk and filet au poivre. The offering of tongue is very unusual too.  Otherwise, for those who aren’t adventurous enough to eat foreign, there are burgers and standard types of steak. Mains are served with French fries, or savoury rice, or mash, or baked potato or salad.

 

The wife remarked that it was one of those menus where nothing interested her and I can dig where she’s coming from, but I thought, if the menu is a tad uninspiringly mainstream, it caters for a wide enough variety of tastes, barring perhaps the vegan, to be okay. The question is, as always, not so much what the menu promises but what the kitchen will deliver. 

 

My mother had the well-done sirloin steak with a mushroom sauce and fries. Her sister had the slow cooked tongue, the wife chose the chicken schnitzel and I went for the Tuscan pork belly.

 

These days my mother eats mainly for fuel and usually leaves half of her meal, for taking home. She does generally moan a bit about her meals,  regardless, so  her comments aren’t germane to this review. 

My aunt had a deliriously happy experience and said that the tongue (slow cooked and sauteed in rosemary butter and served with a red wine jus, mustard relish  and mash), was the best meal she’d ever had, which might be an exaggeration, but her enthusiasm and joy of eating were clearly genuine. She ate like a hungry lion. 

 

Good fortune didn’t smile as much on the wife and me.

 

The chicken schnitzel didn’t remotely resemble the schnitzel one would get, in say, Vienna, and if there were a Schnitzel Board of Control, I’d be a whistle blower, as the two pieces of alleged schnitzel looked suspiciously like the crumbed chicken breast fillets one can buy in your local supermarket, only not as good. The chicken was not properly flattened and was covered in a thick, tasteless and glutinous batter, which lacked any finesse whatsoever. It reminded me, when I took a teeny taste, of the unappetising batter in which a certain Stellenbosch fish and chips shop used to dip their hake in the days my gilded youth. You must “undress” the chicken from its protective “coat,” which tasted like coat, to have any joy of it but, incongruously, the chicken was not nearly as succulent as one would expect, given the thickness of the protective layer, obviously intended to separate the chicken as much as humanly possible from the frying oil. 

 

The fries were no good and the mushroom sauce was tasteless.  The wife characterised her meal as very much below par. 

 

I really should stop ordering pork belly in restaurants, unless it’s Saigon, because the chances of a deep disappointment are greater these days than those of a  happy surprise. Ben’s belly is average at best, and, for me the Tuscan trappings are a miscalculation that does  nothing to bring the dish together.

 

The positives are that the block of belly was substantive, the crust was quite flavourful and as lightly crisp as a ginger snap and half the portion was tender and succulent. Unfortunately, the section of meat just below the crust was too stringy and a tad dry. Belly  doesn’t have much intrinsic flavour and cries out for a deeply rich jus to bring the necessary zing. The cannellini bean puree, with some whole beans too, on which the belly was served, was okay in and of itself but was at odds with the meat and failed to enhance the dish. The quirky, yet mystifying, add-on to the plate, was a puffed-up onion doughnut with the fluffiest of crust that was quite lovely but out of place, I thought, but, if you wanted to add it, there should’ve been a couple more.

 

My fresh side salad was lovely and the mildly acidic vinaigrette  was perfect for cutting through the fattiness of the belly.

 

There was a small serving dish of butternut and onion for the table and this was okay if not earthshattering.

 

My mother had half a malva pudding, with custard, which looked good

; I had a tasty apple crumble, where the tartness of the apple perfectly complemented the sweet crumble and the ice cream provided a bit of lubrication

; and the wife ordered the “New York  Cheesecake”; a small, round tower of creamy cheese (not the kind of dry texture I associate with a good, baked cheesecake), with far too much lemon in it. I ate half of  it because the whole thing was too much for the wife, and by the last spoonful, all one could taste was the lemon. And not in a good way.

 

The service was friendly and efficient and, as I’ve mentioned, the restaurant is quite stylish.

 

The bill, including drinks  and before tip, came to R997,00 for four people which sounds like a good deal, as the portions were generous, but, on reflection,  is still not a good deal if one isn’t satisfies with one’s meal, however it’s priced. The surroundings suggested that the food should be better than it actually was. Okay, the tongue went down a treat, so there was that.

 

We hadn’t eaten at Ben’s for at least 10 years before today and I guess we can go another 10 years without it.