Taste of Durban 2013

Surely the best part about settling into a new city is all of the novel restaurants to explore! No more will Friday evenings be spent mentally reviewing which restaurants you are currently boycotting. No time soon will you be offered your 'usual' the moment that you sit down (I defy anyone to find a better dish on Saki, PMB's menu than the honey, soy and chilli pork noodles). What better opportunity then, than the Taste of Durban festival to sink one's teeth into no fewer than nine of the city's best?

This is the second year that Durban has hosted a Taste Festival, and the organisation could still use a little fine tuning. There was an awkward payment system whereby patrons had to purchase booklets of R5 coupons (or 'Crowns') for all transactions. While this is a sensible enough way to eliminate small change and other tedious money issues, being greeted by a queue at the entrance to the show was a bit of a downer. At times I did also feel a bit as though I was converting from Imperial to Metric, and struggled to determine whether a 4 Crown glass of wine was a bargain or a rip off. Particularly after a couple of glasses.

That aside, the venue was pleasant enough, in an outdoor area adjacent to the Suncoast Casino complex, and the throngs of people, live music, and sounds and smells of competing restaurants made for the perfect atmosphere.

All of the restaurants represented were serving starter sized portions of some of their signature dishes, which meant that it was possible for us to taste at least one dish from every stand, and feel full but not stuffed by the end of the evening.

Showing great endurance and fortitude we visited each of the nine venues to sample their wares. Deep fried olives from Café 1999 were the perfect starter-starter - I need to try making these at home! BAR-BA-COA from Umhlanga was next, and served up some excellent mini burgers and avo dijon fillet rolls. I wonder if the actual restaurant will not fall into the same 'steak on a plate' category as Little Havana, but these mouthfuls were delicious. Alongside the burgers we tasted an aubergine carpaccio from the Beverly Hills' Elements Café which had the grilled aubergine perfectly creamy and silky smooth.

A brief stop for a glass of Hermanuspieterfontein Bloos Rosé 2011, apparently the first South African Rosé to be made from the five Bordeaux varieties. Beautiful to look at and to drink. Pretty.

Next we hit Freedom Café for 'corndog style' beef apricot and pistachio sausage rolls and mini Vietnamese pulled pork buns - good enough to warrant another visit to this restaurant. Caring nothing for logical order we followed that up with sushi and champagne from Beluga (good), Simply Asia chicken satay and noodles (so-so) and paused briefly to sample an odd assortment of flavoured tequila shooters. Bubblegum tequila is blue, I learned, and tastes of Wicks.

Entering the final stretch now we popped in to Palki Indian Restaurant (fantastic, spicy butter chicken) and paused a while to enjoy oxtail risotto from Hartford House, probably the first properly cooked restaurant risotto I've eaten anywhere (and full of hearty, robust flavours - my choice for best dish of the festival).

Just to finish off the Crowns (annoyingly only available in bundles of 20) we ended with nachos from Little Havana, which were served in perfect single bite servings, and another glass of the HPF Bloos.

Sitting and enjoying the cover band while we waited for our lift home from Good Fellas we soaked in the balmy Durban winter night and considered our options for future outings. Lots of blog posts to follow!

Friday Nights: Little Havana, Umhlanga

A crisp, white tablecloth raises certain expectations of a venue. More formal. More sophisticated. More expensive... At Little Havana in Umhlanga's popular Chartwell Drive, white was the first impression that I felt as I stepped through the doors into this fairly large restaurant of about forty tables. We were seated (on white chairs) at a table close to an open window which allowed in a cool breeze that smelled of rain and the ocean.

Our waiter presented us with the wine list, which met with my expectation of high prices. The list did appear carefully curated and offered some less commonly seen bottles, but sparkling wine choices were limited, so I settled on a bottle of Krone Rosé which I had brought along as a backup. Corkage was R45.

Little Havana has to be commended on their starter options which, unlike their main courses, were varied and interesting. We settled on an oven roasted camembert and pancetta and an intriguingly titled 'deconstructed prawn samoosa'. The camembert was delicious, although the streaky bacon which it was wrapped in, while salty, crisp, and smoky against the smooth cheese, was certainly not pancetta.

The deconstructed prawn samoosa was the best part of my meal. A generous portion, it consisted of a Mauritian-style prawn curry, which was sweet and hot, piled high on a plate and interleaved with sheets of samoosa wrapper pastry that were crunchy on the edges and soft where they were soaked with the sauce of the curry.

Feeling confident that we had found a restaurant of above average quality, we turned to the main courses, and examined the steak options which are essentially a mix and match of cut, sides, and sauce. All steaks are seasoned alike, with salt, pepper, mustard seeds and thyme, and come with the obligatory choices of chips ('shoestring fries'), rice or baked potato. Side options included those horribly uninspired stalwarts, creamed spinach and cinnamon butternut. Feeling good after our starters, we decided that the minimalist menu was indicative of superior, no-nonsense meat, and not simply a lack of imagination on the part of the chef.

I ordered a free-range, grass fed rib eye steak, medium rare, with a side order of onion rings, chips and 'Cuban rum barbecue sauce', which was the most interesting sounding sauce on offer. Service was brisk, with my steak arriving less than ten minutes after ordering, despite the full restaurant.

To be honest, I don't know who is still impressed by the presentation of a steak that sits looking lonely on the middle of a large white plate, with one of those cheap ramekins of sauce as its only company. Yes, the steak was good, but no - it was not able to carry the whole course all on its own. The sauce tasted like catering grade 'BBQ' sauce with a splash of alcohol, and the chips were underdone. The onion rings, which were fluffy, hot and moreish, struggled manfully to rescue the overall impression but didn't quite manage, and the toothpick flag stuck into the meat didn't help to raise the tone of the dish either.

Our second order was a rare rump steak where the quality of the meat was unfortunately not good enough to match the short cooking time and which remained tough and chewy.

The pudding menu continued in the traditional vein introduced by the main courses, and not feeling like another crème brûlée, I settled for a cappuccino and a ten year old Laphroaig, which never disappoints.

Overall, we left the restaurant feeling disappointed. They would do well to infuse some Cuban elements into the cuisine beyond the name of the place and the Che Guevara shirts on the support staff. Where were the citrus flavours, the capers, olives or black beans? Where was the rum? The steaks for which little Havana is known are overrated, and sorely deficient in interest. The promise of the white table cloths was not met, and the commercial nature of the meal denied the revolutionary potential of the name.

More 1990s than 1950s Havana.