Bramon Wine Estate: We came, we saw the menu and we over-ordered.

 6 April 2023

 

BRAMON WINE ESTATE 

The Crags, N2, Plettenberg Bay 

 

On the day after my birthday the wife and I returned to Bramon for the first time in a couple of years for what turned out to be a lunch of gluttonous excess, but how were we to restrain ourselves when faced with a menu that wouldn’t accept frugality as an answer?

 

There’s a gin tasting hooch at the entrance to the winery property and then the gravel road winds through the vineyards for a bit until you arrive at the old-fashioned building that once might have been a 19^th century farmhouse, that’s been gutted and repurposed inside to a contemporary bistro style.

 

There are tables inside, some on a covered stoep outside and some between vines and beneath umbrellas. It was far too hot to dine completely al fresco and we compromised by taking a seat at a long wooden table on the stoep with a grand view of the great outdoors.

 

The menu is tapas-based and if there is one thing the wife and I have learnt about tapas menus, and yet we also never seem to learn, is that we go berserk, without restraint, and order food for a feudal family feast when it’s just the two of us.  

 

Firstly, there was the most decadent, wickedly sumptuous plaited bread with a chewy, elastic texture that could be eaten on its own as starter, main and dessert, with standard hummus, red pepper hummus and olive tapenade.

 

There were the two sets of phyllo pastry cigars respectively filled with bobotie and spinach & Feta, accompanied by chutney and tzatziki dips.

 

There was a beautifully baked Camembert.

 

There was a luxurious charcouterie board. 

 

There was a bowl of scrumptious crumbed mussels, which I ordered because I feared the other items wouldn’t be filing enough. The wife didn’t eat any of it.

 

Finally, as health option, there was a light and fresh pear, walnut and goats’ cheese salad. The wife ate some of it and I had none.

 

The wife drank a glass of estate white wine and I stuck to a lager. This was the only frugality of the meal.

 

The food is brought in waves and after the first batch that already seems to be sufficiently abundant, one forgets there are outstanding items and when the next lot arrives one experiences a sense of shock that there is yet more to consume. I expect the waitress was astonished at our ostensibly huge appetites or wondered we were ordering for still-to-arrive friends as well.

 

I can’t lie. The food was excellent. Every morsel was tasty, yummy and otherwise not too shabby.  

 

When we reached the end of our ingestion tethers, we still had a significant chunk of the bread, hummus and tapenade and most of the salad left and took the remnants back to our hotel. We’d planned to eat dinner there, Fairview House, where we’d had a splendid three course meal the night before, but by the end of the  Bramon lunch we already knew that dinner would be a bridge too far and after a late afternoon post-prandial snooze we simply ate the lunch leftovers in our hotel room while sipping good scotch. 

 

The service at Bramon was friendly and efficient, the food well worth the visit (but be careful to err on the side of caution when you order) and the setting is superb. I paid R1180,00, all inclusive, for the meal and did so with a smile.