Restaurant week dining at Protégé, Franschhoek

 16 April 2022

 

Protégé

Le Quartier Francais, Huguenot Street, Franschhoek

 

An elegant sufficiency.

 

That’s one of my favourite phrases to describe a satisfactory meal, both in quantity and quality, and today we had it in spades at Protégé.

 

The wife and I have been cautiously dipping our toes back into the ocean of dining opportunities after the protracted Dark Ages of the soul that was the Covid period and concomitant restrictions and this weekend we tried out some proper fine dining just to see if we could still hack it.

 

Hack it with style, is what we did.

 

As soon as we set foot in the large, open, simply furnished yet elegant room with a view of a splendid garden and sat down to have a gander at the literally small, yet hugely enticing, mane, we looked at each other and said, “This is the kind of room where we come to  party.”

 

Actually, we simply told each other that we’d missed this kind of experience and were deeply gratified we could once more step into the breach.

 

Protégé (the neighbour of Epice in the Quartier Francais building) consists of a large open interior with mostly blonde Scandinavian influenced wooden furniture, with a couple of darker tables on the street side of the large open square that houses the kitchen where the brigade goes about its business with monastically quiet efficiency, but also has counter seating around it. There are also outside tables at the front of the building, a level lower than the pavement, and some in the garden. Today the weather was blustery and only a few hardy souls sat outside. 

 

We were there for lunch and the restaurant week (stretched to a month) special of four courses for R450 a head. Four of the  courses were small plates and there was a choice of three mains, respectively vegetarian, beef or fish.

 

The menu also offered two snacks and two sweet desserts and a cheese board, which would be an additional cost, and  mentioned a palate cleanser before the main course, petit fours to finish and the option of doing a wine pairing.  

 

The wife and I drank respectively a carafe of La Motte sauvignon blanc and a gin and tonic. We also had a bottle of still water for the table. Drinking at lunch is nice but neither of us care for day drunkenness.

 

The service was highly efficient and super friendly, with a chatty waiter who not only served with a smile but engaged in interesting conversation other than the standard descriptions of the elements of each dish.

 

The first course was bread, two slices of lovely, thick, lightly toasted sourdough with a smoked bone-marrow butter and moreish beef tartare, and two light-as-air cheese sticks with a pastry that was so short there was no need to chew once the stick entered the mouth. You could simply let it melt for the cheesy flavour to permeate.

 

The second (umami oysters)

and third (spiced, glazed pork bao buns) courses were served simultaneously. Apparently, one is supposed to eat the bao bun before moving on to the oyster, but it made more sense to us to have the lighter bite first and the meat to follow.

 

The foamy froth covering the oysters was redolent of the ocean and there was a blithe citrus tang. The spicy pork and soft, yet gooey, buns were scrumptious.

 

The last small plate was the superb sonata of the sea of seared Cape Malay tuna, with kerala, curry leaf and sultana chutney,  with a perfect mixture of crunch and softness, spicy and mild. The tuna was like the most sublime sashimi.  We ate slowly and in the dead silence of culinary euphoria, and when we sat back our immediate bingo! response was that this was the best thing we’d eaten so far.

 

The wife’s main was the fillet steak with pea puree, pickled red cabbage, crisp sweetbreads ad a pepper truffle cream and mine was Kingklip, the line fish of the day, with chimichurri, paper thin, crisp chorizo discs, baby squid and a smoked mussel velouté.

 

The beef fillet was perfectly cooked, with a stunning, visually beautiful, deeply rich sauce, and yummy side elements. The wife exclaimed that it was one of the best steaks and sauces she’d ever had.

 

The kingklip came with an equally unctuous and rich smoked  mussel  sauce, had the lightest of crusts and the flesh inside was buttery soft, easily the best fish I’ve eaten for a long time. The other elements yet again perfectly combined flavourful textures.

 

We were (almost) replete and highly satisfied.

 

However, there was a thing.  We’d not been served the palate  cleansers mentioned on the menu.

 

When we queried this omission, the waiter, ostensibly confused,  took the menu away and another person returned to explain that we’d been given the “wrong’ menu, and that the palate cleanser and petite four (and, I guess, the wine pairing), were not in fact part of our meal. Our guess was that we had the dinner menu; why, we couldn’t fathom.

 

We were offered free coffees to soothe our ire, and the wife ordered the banana and chocolate dessert

and I chose the cheese board.

 

The sweet dessert was optimally banana-esque and utterly delicious. The cheese board came with tiny slices of brioche melba toast, and consisted of a creamy cheese, a Camembert type thing and some aged dry cheese, plus a caramelise onion relish and some olives.  Quite delightful.

 

The bill, with discretionary gratuity of 12,5% tip already added, came to R1591,90. 

 

The wife and I are slowly returning to pre Covid-normalcy from a dining out perspective and you can hardly beat this setting and this meal for helping to ease one back into old, temporarily abandoned, habits. Protégé offers understated elegance, excellent service, beautifully plated and perfectly cooked nosh.