What do you imagine when you think of an international-award winning, fine dining seafood restaurant in a sunny coastal town with white-washed architecture and an azure sky?
An ostentatious, air-conditioned, glass-fronted room perhaps, with crisp white tablecloths, bistro music, a view of anchored yachts, and a stiff manager? Wolfgat, located in a small fishing village on South Africa’s West Coast, could not be further from it, and that’s what makes it so perfect.
From the street, a quaint 130-year-old fisherman’s cottage with nothing more than a nondescript sign reveals to me that I have arrived. On entering, the first thing that immediately stands out is an inspired soundtrack, not surprising given chef, food philosopher, and famed botanicals forager, Kobus van der Merwe’s deep and lifelong interest in music.
Despite being very much on the A-list food map of Cape Town for several years now, a list which includes an impressive and remarkably affordable array of exceptional dining options for foreign tourists, a meal at Wolfgat still has an innovative, almost accidental, and unscripted charm that is hard to describe. It is also always fully booked, and months in advance.
