Dialling it up to only 7 at Eleven

 21 September 2024

 

ELEVEN RESTAURANT

11 Huguenot Street, Franschhoek

 

I know a brigade in a high-end kitchen is supposed to work quietly, efficiently and with no undue delay but at points during tonight’s service we felt like hamsters on a treadmill that’d subtly sped up during of the evening, given how speedily the courses followed on each other. 

 

It wasn’t as if the restaurant was pushing us to eat and get out, to make space for new arrivals, but on a special evening like tonight, when the wife and I celebrated 20 years together, we would’ve preferred a more leisurely procession of courses to give us some  pause and time for  reflection. 

 

In the ongoing discussion about how and where we should celebrate, the conclusion was that we weren’t keen on an exorbitantly expensive tasting menu with so many courses you’ve forgotten what you started with by the time you get to the palate cleanser, and Eleven Restaurant, a new name to us, seemed to offer the perfect solution: four courses (with three options per course) for R590,00 a head.

 

They also had a 9-course plat du jour menu for R950,00 but the one dessert option was the deal breaker; for me anyway.

 

The restaurant is situated in the space where the Reuben Riffel’s Let’s Frite “casual dining burger bar” joint used to be. We ate there once, many moons ago, weren’t impressed and weren’t surprised at or shocked by its demise.

 

The interior design is a simple and elegant bistro, with minimal decorations and plain wooden tables. There is a large fireplace to provide the welcome warmth we craved on yet another icy, windy Franschhoek night, and our table was in front of it and close to the open plan kitchen where the chef and brigade were indeed operating almost soundlessly.

 

We mixed it up to get a broader view of the dishes.

 

My choices were the tuna potage, the ravioli, pan seared Cape Bream and peanut butter tart. By some odd coincidence every savoury dish I selected was served with a velouté type sauce.

 

The wife chose the Dal Molise mozzarella, the Patagonian squid, Caldhame duck breast and the Valrhona mousse.

 

There were three different types of amuse bouche (a carrot tartlet, snoek croquettes and duck liver parfait) and a bread course of two half rolls and some artisanal butter. The tartlet and the croquettes were tasty but the parfait was a bit bland. The butter, split with some kinda oil, was okay   with the bread but not very pleasant on its own.

 

My tuna starter was like sashimi with accompanying bits and bobs to provide some acidity to set off against the rich tuna and the lovely sauce. 

 

The filling of the ravioli was tasty but the pasta work was iffy. The edges were too thick and a bit tough to eat.    Half decent but needs work.

 

The wife loved her mozzarella starter; it was light, refreshing, beautiful to look at and a definite knock-out and possibly the best dish of the night for her. The flavours of  the squid were unbalanced and too salty. The quantities were out of kilter too, with only 4 measly pieces of squid with a whole lot of fairly well-made gnocchi, on a very salty feta cream, which made it seem more like a pasta dish than a seafood one. Even though the individual elements were all well cooked and well made, it just did not come together as a cohesive, enjoyable dish.

 

The wife was disappointed with her main course. The duck was well cooked but the skin was far from crispy and so unpleasantly rubbery (“It’s so horrible I can’t even look at it”) she put it aside, there were far too many textures of beetroot for her taste (she’s not a fan of beetroot) and she thought that serving only one quite delicious potato croquette was taking the piss.

Lastly, she also thought the portion size wasn’t worthy of being called a main course.

 

My Bream was well-cooked but it was rather small and thin and made me reminisce, with a mixture of nostalgia and regret, about our recent breakaway to Türkiye where I had some of the best seafood ever. If you order Bream, you’re likely to get a whole fish and at a very decent price. Not in this country.

 

This was a starter portion masquerading as a main course.

 

The desserts lifted our spirits. 

Firstly, there was a pre-dessert of some kind of cinnamony  doughnut that was pleasant yet immediately forgettable .

My peanut butter tartlet (with honeycomb pattern tuille) was a morsel of pure delight.

 

The Valrhona mousse was deeply rich and the sorbet provided a refreshing lightness to the dessert. Unfortunately, the meringue served with the chocolate mousse came out badly and was chewy instead of crisp and unpleasant to eat.

 

The meal was rounded off by three types of petit four: home-made marshmallow, fudge and a home-made fruit pastille thingies.  All very tasty.

The bill came to R1545,00, reduced on the night to R1045,00 because of a R500,00 deposit. We had a bottle of water, two glasses of bubbly and a cocktail for our drinks.

 

The restaurant is elegant and the hearth gave it a  wonderful ambience on a cold night and the service was exemplary. As mentioned, the turbo-charged pacing of the courses was a tad disconcerting and the main courses were disappointing but, on the whole, the standard is good and the evening was fun.  

 

One can’t fault them for generosity. Over and above the featured four courses, we had four additional courses (amuse bouche, bread, pre-dessert and petit fours)  of which only the dessert and the butter weren’t particularly memorable; the pastry chef, on the other hand, deserves kudos.

 

The wife’s report card for the meal rated it as: “Can do better,” i.e. the food for the most part looked and tasted good, but the speed of delivery (with no time to breathe and take a sip of wine before the next dish was served) coupled with some clear errors in the cooking of certain elements and unbalanced dished, made for an okay rather than fabulous dinner. The standards of fine dining in Cape Town and Franschhoek are very high and Eleven needs to do some retooling and refining to reach the  lofty standards of similar restaurants in the hood.