The oracle of Delphi has spoken

According to Greek Mythology, Delphi was the centre of the earth, as determined by eagles sent forth by Zeus himself, and was home to the Delphic Oracle. According to TripAdvisor, it is also the 76th best rated restaurant out of 160 in Durban (in its defense it has a 90% recommendation rate based on only 11 reviews), and is home to some of the best Greek food in Durban.

Delphi (they spell it Delfi) is found in Lilian Ngoyi (Windermere) Road in Morningside, and is housed in an unprepossessing building just off the road. When we visited, the place looked a little like the temple of Apollo with its tumbledown columns - the wind had recently blown down their patio roof.

Perhaps fortunately, I had forgotten my camera, as the interior is very Greek-kitsch, with lots of checked table cloths, faded posters, chipped plates on the wall (memorabilia from a big plate smashing night?) and tastefully arrayed plastic grapevines.

The wine list is on the minimal side, but luckily I had come prepared with a bottle of Waterford Rose-Mary in the boot, and their corkage is a very reasonable R15.

The place seems to do very well out of repeat business, which speaks well for it - there was much hugging of the owners, and plenty of people seemed to know exactly what they were going to order. It's a small restaurant, with only room for 6 or 7 tables. 

We ordered the meze platter for starters, as well as a portion of squid heads. The platter was the highlight of the whole meal, and featured fantastic eggplant, saganaki, kofta and dolmades. The squid heads were decent, but not as good as some.

The main course was less inspiring - my lamb shank kleftiko was very tender, but a little flavourless, with a thick, sticky gravy which did not add greatly to the experience. The side dish of rice was also cooked with frozen peas and carrots, a pet peeve of mine. The chicken souvlaki was served in a pita and was fairly good, but also lacked real depth of flavour, focusing mainly on garlic, with few other tastes coming through. I felt that it could have used more tzatziki, lemon, dill or mint.

Dessert - the halva and icecream was delicious - I need to make this at home, but the galaktoboureko was also a little plain. The less said about coffee the better.

Overall - it's a cheap and cheerful spot, with simple, hearty fare on a road with several other restaurants. If in doubt, pop in for the meze, and if nothing else takes your fancy - go for a roving dinner.

This little piggy went to Market

When we arrive at Market for a leisurely brunch they are only just opening up at 9am, but Durban is like that. The place is well hidden, with a narrow pathway beside a fairly nondescript building in Gladys Mazibuko (Marriott) Road leading into a rather lovely courtyard. 

Beneath the trees, the gravel is scattered with fallen leaves. A bulky lady squeezed into a regulation maid’s outfit is attempting to gather them up with a rake. She is assaulting the leaves with relentless strokes, and moving more stone than leaf in the process. The source of her frustration is a ring of graceful Leopard trees surrounding a small stone pond. The pond features a fountain, which is anaemically pulsing tepid water through the moist air down to the koi that circle below. A man in tight fitting yellow pants and a white, v-neck that shows off his tattooed arms, carefully measures out a single scoop of pellets for the pond’s gaping inhabitants. Judging by his proprietary air, he is the owner of the fountain, the trees, and the restaurant that they form part of. 

At the table next to ours, a young couple takes their seats. She wears an orange sheath that complements her obvious fake tan, and the too-thick makeup which covers her face. Despite the breakfast hour, she has obviously spent time preparing her eyelashes, which are too long to be real and must have been meticulously applied with adhesive, like some kind of disguise. Her boyfriend is explaining something obvious to her, in an unconsciously condescending fashion: ‘No you have to go into the bank to change your account limit… No, they won’t let you do it online’. She looks admiringly at him, impressed by his mastery of the self-evident.

‘Are you ready to order?’ Our waitress has taken her style cues from the restaurant owner, or perhaps there is a dress code – like him, she has a collection of tattoos, Cyrillic script on the forearm, a religious symbol near her shoulder, and a fairy that adorns her ankle. We order drinks: freshly squeezed carrot and orange juice with extra ginger, and later, coffee. Both are excellent. 

For brunch we order croissant French toast with lemon curd and crispy bacon, and a potato rosti, salmon, crème fraîche and poached egg combination. The croissant French toast is so good that I have taken to making it at home. The unusual pairing with lemon curd is fun, tasty and different. The rosti is equally good - a fairly regular breakfast arrangement, but the proportions of egg, salmon and crème fraîche are just right, making the medium sized portion sit perfectly - not too heavy, not too light.

As we eat, we watch the couple next to us and attempt to guess at their relationship. Now they are asking each other what type of music they like, what TV shows they watch. Is it a first date? Perhaps she has slept over at his place, and is wearing her makeup from the night before. He outlines for her his plans for workplace success: ‘I just need to score a couple of big deals’, he says, ‘then I’ll be ready for promotion when he retires’. She makes supportive noises, but seems more interested in her breakfast (she has also gone for the rosti with salmon and poached egg).

Before leaving we explore the retail space opposite the restaurant. Called Shoppe, it is full of art, ceramics and furniture from South African designers. They stock Lisa Firer, Sootcookie and many other artists, and the shelves are full of beautiful items that you normally see only in decor magazines. Think of it as dessert.

La Storia - hit and miss Italian Restaurant

It often seems to me that every other restaurant that one visits is Italian - there apparently exists a large portion of the South African restaurant going population that would be personally offended to arrive at a restaurant and discover that it offers neither pizza nor pasta. In popular imagination, Italy must be a magical place, draped in red and white checks where the penne arrabiata is bottomless, and the margherita pizza is free for kids every Tuesday.

So, when I read the menu at La Storia in Westville, I got a little excited. Yes there were the inevitable pages devoted to pizza and pasta, but alongside these stalwarts, some less obvious dishes made their appearance, including a whole section on risottos, and some locally inspired meals like the prawns Mozambique.

On our first visit to La Storia, we dropped in late after work and so settled for a simple order of pizzas and beer. I had the Tandoori chicken. The first thing I noticed, was that the pizzas are not round, but shaped into a rough oblong and sliced into rustic triangles. The crust is heftier than most wood fired artisanal pizzas, and bready, but in a good way, with a hint of yeast and with charred and blackened spots straight out of the oven. The topping of fantastic, fragrant tandoori chicken, interspersed with dhania yoghurt and scattered with mint leaves was a welcome change from chain restaurant standards, and overall, I was impressed.

On a second visit we took a little time and ventured further into the menu. The tomato salad was fresh and tasty. Simple ingredients, elegantly brought together, it made for a good starter, together with the antipasti board with home cured meats, pickles and bruschetta.

Next, with nervous anticipation, I ordered a risotto main course. Risotto, I believe, is not a difficult dish to make. It is, however, a slow dish to create. There are no shortcuts over the stove to achieve the perfect, oozing, glutinous and magical mouth feel of a good risotto. Which is probably why, every time I've ordered it at restaurants I have been disappointed. Almost without fail, restaurant risotto is undercooked, with a raw center of hard starch lurking in every grain.

My selection was prepared with calamari, chorizo, black olive and chili. The portion was reasonably large, without being generous, but a large proportion of the volume went to the toppings. I struggled to pull together a full forkful of rice to test, but when I did, was dismayed to discover that true to type it was under cooked, and over salted. The calamari and chorizo were tasty, but anyone would be hard pressed to make chorizo taste bad. Overall, the dish was a let down.

Happily, the desert went some way to rectifying the situation - a delicious affogato, three scoops of home made icecream, with a shot of hot, bitter esspresso.

With its laid back decor of mismatched chairs and tables, its friendly, noisy interior and its impressive pizza oven, La Storia feels like the kind of place that you could hang out at on a fairly regular basis. The old faithfuls are well rendered, and the more inventive options, even if they aren't quite there, are at least on the menu. Inconsistent, but you're more likely to leave pleased than peeved.

Not the same old Storia.

Lazy Sundays: Cape Town Fish Market, North Beach

Suncoast Casino and Entertainment World on Durban's North Beach, with its faux art deco styling does well to stand out as particularly tacky in a city that is known more for its riotous colour and laid back surfer vibes than for its restrained class and elegance.

Having said that, the position of the complex makes it a great place to use as a base for taking long walks on the promenade, and its beach frontage is particularly pleasant. It also hosts a lot of good events, like the Mercury Wine Week and the Taste of Durban, so I find myself drawn there more often than I would have expected (I have yet to hit the slot machines...)

We headed out recently on Spring Day to take in the atmosphere on the beach front and enjoyed a couple of hours walking up to Country Club Beach and back. The promenade is one of my favourite places in Durban, and its wide, flat walkway attracts people employing every mode of locomotion imaginable, with roller bladers, skate boarders and bmx-ers vying for space with tandem bikers, pedal cars, joggers and dog walkers.

The warm spring sun, salty air and sea breeze were making us hungry and thirsty so we decided to stop in at the Cape Town Fish Market which is located on the beach side of Suncoast and has a pretty good view over the promenade and onto the sea.

Now obviously CTFM is not what you would consider an upper end establishment, but as chain restaurants go it is generally pretty good, so a certain standard was expected. This standard was not met. On arrival we stood in the entrance and waited to be seated. Eventually a manager of some description wandered over to us and proceeded to shout like a fish wife (appropriately) for a waiter to show us to a table. Our waiter then gestured outside and suggested we help ourselves. The only table available had recently been vacated, so we stood and waited for it to be cleared. After a few minutes the same manager reappeared, and when I explained that we were waiting for our table to be cleared proceeded to shout at the waiters again, instead of simply picking up the plates herself.

Having sat down, we ordered beers which arrived together with dripping wet glasses, which we declined. I like it straight out the bottle anyway - cuts out the middleman. We chose the 'seafood plank' as a starter, and found it reasonably priced and rather good. Hot fishcakes, tempura prawns (which appeared to have been crumbed with Panko) and calamari strips. The 'tartare' sauce turned out to be mayonnaise, but otherwise it was just the thing to enjoy next to the beach with a beer.

Having overcome our initial poor service and enjoyed out starter, we decided to order a main course of calamari. Sadly, after waiting with increasing annoyance for about forty minutes we realised that the calamari was clearly still on its way from Cape Town. Twenty minutes after the waiter had assured us that the dish was almost ready, I issued an ultimatum to the manager - food on the table in five minutes or we're leaving.

As I write this, I wonder if the waiter found our abandoned table with the cash tucked under an empty beer bottle before or after the calamari was finally placed on the grill.

So long, and no thanks for all the fish.

Friday Nights: Sevruga, Gateway

Sevruga is part of the Caviar group of restaurants, which includes two venues in Capetown, and now two in Durban. Adverts for the restaurants appear regularly in TASTE magazine, and the Eat Out guide, and invariably feature long haired, blonde models whose enjoyment of the food appears to border on the indecent. The food-porn theme continues on their website, which is currently down, and amusingly offers the Freudian excuse that they are 'currently too busy servicing our guests'. Being of the opinion that good food photography does not require a side of high heels and come-hither glances, I was initially wary of visiting the new Sevruga restaurant at Gateway, worrying that they had chosen glamour over substance.

Happily, however, we had received several 50% off promotional vouchers at the Taste of Durban festival, so determined to take full advantage before they expired, we visited the restaurant twice in a month, once as a couple and once with friends.

The restaurant is located on the Eastern side of the mall, overlooking the Wavehouse and is an impressively large 300 seater. Front of house we were greeted (as expected?) by two bored looking model types, dressed for a night on the town, who ushered us to our table in their matching micro dresses before mincing back to their positions.

The initial service experience was frustrating, as we were descended upon by at least four different servers, each of whom offered us 'a bottle of water for the table', attempted to drape napkins over our laps and generally fell over one other. Once the help had settled down, however, and our eyes had a chance to adjust to the deep gloom of the restaurant interior, we were able to begin enjoying the experience, and page through the extensive menu, which features wonderful and exotic sounding 'regular' dishes (risotto balls with truffle aioli, deboned lamb ribs, marinated springbok) as well as a lengthy dim sum and sushi section.

We had come for the sushi, so the regular section of the menu will have to wait for a later review. To begin, we ordered a portion of Har Gau (translucent dim sum) filled with duck, honey and ginger. Service was prompt (our final waitress on our initial visit was lovely) and presentation was beautiful, with the three generously sized dumplings nestled in still steaming bamboo, and shaped in a way that I had not seen before, with a pretty tri-lobed finish. I would have enjoyed a more pronounced ginger flavour, but they were definitely delicious, with a wonderful soft mouth feel.

Next came a round of crispy, deep fried wontons, filled this time with beef, coriander and ginger. Again they arrived promptly, beautifully presented, hot and tasty.

An interesting offer on the menu was the bowl of Edamame beans. I had heard that these were a popular dish in Japan and China, but didn't realise until they arrived at the table that they are in fact simply immature soybeans, served steamed in their pods and eaten with salt. The characteristically hairy and rather drab looking pods, when broken open yielded up a surprisingly beautiful harvest of plump, shiny, jade-green beans. These offered a good test of my chopstick wielding abilities as I initially ate them one by one after manoeuvring them through a ponzu bath, before abandoning pretenses and popping them directly into my mouth.

The Tom Yum soup, which I tried on our second visit, was wonderfully fiery, with a dangerous red sheen across the bowl, and a good hot and sour balance. Since enjoying Tom Yum in Bangkok, I have been on the lookout for a South African experience which can compare to what we tasted there. This one was one of the better that I've tasted - perhaps too much emphasis on the chili, but I enjoyed eating it immensely.

Having visited the dim sum pages, we moved on to the sushi, and ordered a selection of California rolls, sashimi, something called a 'samurai roll' and the 'tuna crunch' which involved tuna tempura rolled with cream cheese before being tempura battered a second time (purists, look away).

When we visited as a couple, all of the dishes which we ordered were presented on a single plate, which was a nice effect. Generally all of the sushi we ordered on both visits was well constructed, fresh and tasty, although I felt that too much mayonnaise was in use, something which I feel detracts from the fresh, Asian flavours of really good sushi.

On our first visit we bypassed the deserts and ended instead with an apple martini lolly - there are several variants of these alcoholic ices, and they are served in a retro ice lolly shape. Good fun, and a great palate cleanser.

When we did try the deserts, they were out of the chocolate fondant that we had wanted to order, and so I had to fall back on the crème brûlée. It was a pretty good effort, with vanilla seeds spotted through the silky smooth custard, but I still felt a bit disappointed. I think that perhaps crème brûlée has been overdone to the point that only making them at home still holds much appeal - rather stick to the lollies.

With its sophisticated interior, extensive, well executed menu and great wine list, Sevruga is a welcome addition to the Durban restaurant landscape. If they can tone the service down to an unobtrusive level (without venturing into the neglect we experienced on our second visit) and perhaps sort out a few issues with availability there will be very little on which to fault them. Fun for a date night, or an evening out with friends, I rate it worthy of a third helping.

Lazy Sundays: Café Fish

If you're in Durban and you want to eat out on the water, you can't find a much better location than Café Fish. Situated on a pier that juts from the city into the ocean at the Durban Yacht Basin, one can easily take in the pleasure boats of the Point Yacht Club to one side and the tall red cranes and multi-hued container boats of the Harbour to the other. The venue makes the most of its position, with high floor to ceiling windows that spill light across the widely spaced tables, simply decorated in nautical blue and white.

Apparently if you are there at the right time you can watch the seafood being offloaded from a boat right at the kitchen door. I was happy to settle for watching it being offloaded from the arms of the waitress onto the table. Lunch had arrived, in the form of a traditional beer battered fish and chips and grilled peri-peri prawns.

Given the name of Café Fish, the eponymous dish needed to be good - and it was. The beer battered fish and chips were good value, with two large fillets of moist and flaky fish surrounded by a batter that managed to be simultaneously pillowy-soft and deep-fried crisp. The tartar sauce was generously spiked with roughly chopped pickles, the chips were hot and fresh and the whole dish went down very well drenched in lemon juice.

The grilled peri-peri prawns lived up to their simple name and arrived with the benefit of a large wire basket to gather the shells, which were picked completely clean before being discarded. The peri-peri sauce could have been a little hotter, but it was well balanced with garlic and lemon.

The menu looks as though it would benefit from a thorough exploration, with the Vietnamese style calamari  (chilli, mint, garlic, pineapple and peanuts) and the cajun linefish in particular catching my eye. Sadly, the pudding menu looked rather dull in comparison (unless you enjoy Banoffie Pie), so we opted to finish with coffee, which was good enough, but took a while to arrive.

Café Olé!

Hole in the Wall: Kebabish

Nothing says 'Durban' quite like a really authentic Indian curry. I don't mean those dull stews that masquerade as curry in most restaurants - anything that's been toned down for Western tastes, or is offered to you in 'mild'. Definitely not one of those meals for one from Woolies. I'm talking about a genuine, ghee-drenched, spice-studded, handed-down-for-generations, whole-chillies-floating-in-the-sauce kind of curry. This kind of no-nonsense curry tends to avoid fancy restaurants in the best parts of town, but can generally be discovered in places like Phoenix, Chatsworth or Overport, invariably out of dodgy looking takeaways down hard to find streets. This is the kind of curry found in places like Kebabish.

Kebabish is a small sit-down restaurant and bustling takeaway on the corner of Sparks and Felix Dlamini (Brickfield) Road in Overport. It sits alongside what appears to be a junkyard, complete with cars on bricks and a mean looking junkyard dog that barks at you as you walk past the chain-link fence. It isn't pretty, but the smells which carry across the street tell you that you've come to the right place.

On the forecourt of the building which houses Kebabish there is a hot, open charcoal grill that was manned on the Saturday afternoon we visited by two hard working staff. One man, sweating profusely, was bending over the hot fire and alternating between fanning the coals with a paper plate and turning enormous sizzling skewers of chicken and mutton. The other walked back and forth between the kitchen and the grill, arriving with buckets piled high with spicy, raw meat and leaving soon after, weighed down under platters of smoky, charred and dripping delights.

At the counter, which faces the street, six or seven people were passing orders to a large man with an even larger beard who shouted into a hidden kitchen and glowered at people who dithered over their choices. Driven into a mild panic by my failed first attempt at ordering ('no chicken seekh kebab curry!') and his generally soup-nazi behavior I settled on chicken tikka masala and a chicken korma with garlic naan, and was told to 'give me half an hour, ok?'

After the promised half an hour, a large plastic bag was pushed into my greedy hands with a smile (he smiles!) and we carried our treasure home, the car's interior filling with wonderful smells on the way. Impatiently unwrapping the parcel, we pulled out the fragrant naan, thick and misshapen, touched with spots of dark scorched bread, and the two curries. The tikka, dark red, and topped with vermilion oil (I tipped off the excess), and the korma, creamy and sultry in its thick sauce. Two small ziploc bags filled with cool, green raita, and a side salad were thrown in too.

Of the two dishes, the chicken tikka was the better - filled with chunks of chicken taken off the grill and fiery hot. The korma was calmer and richer, the sauce delicious, although the chicken pieces on the bone were not what I would have chosen. The naan was as good as it looked, bready and garlicky, alternatively soft and crunchy by turn.

I'm told by a friend who swears by the quarter chicken tikka that that dish is the best thing on the menu - but I'm not going to take his word for it, I'm definitely going back for more!

Kebabish gets a fourish out of five - for the flavour, and the experience.