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Daily Maverick

V is for VUUR: A fiery bro-fest redefines what a restaurant can be

After a tour of a fine foods business that grew out of a car boot, fire rained down on a sunny, lazy day on a Stellenbosch farm. If fire could make waves, this was it. She ate an oyster for the first time in all the 26 years of her life so far, right in front of me. She had her android device on video, trained at her face, while she focused, smiled, and let the sweet Saldanha Bay oyster slide into her mouth. Three or four chews and down it went. 'That was nice. Quite nice. Hmmmm,' she said, laughing the kind of laughter that you laugh when you're pretty pleased with yourself but not sure why you did that. Then she ate a Namibian oyster from Lüderitz, even bigger, but more metallic than sweet, and less salty than the West Coast mollusc. I was not at all surprised. Naomi Campbell had already shown herself, over the preceding two days, to be brimful of questions. And curiosity is one of the best attributes of a journalist. You just want to know, need to know, have to know. So now Naomi Campbell knows what it's like to eat an oyster. A live oyster. Uh-oh. I had not thought to mention that part. We were at the Wild Peacock factory and shop that has its origins in 1992 when Sue Baker imported a load of live oysters, collected them at the old Cape Town airport, then called the chefs she knew and said, I have oysters, I can bring them directly to you, how many would you like? And Wild Peacock was born, out of the boot of her little old car. Soon afterwards, she called me and offered to bring me some. I was editor of Top of the Times back then and writing weekly food columns for the Cape Times. She arrived at my Tamboerskloof front door and I poached them lightly in champagne and served them to Anette and Jeremy Cowley-Nel for dinner that night. They still talk about them. Must have been good oysters Sue Baker was getting. Andrew, her husband, invited me for a tour of the facility while I was in Stellenbosch last week. Now it is run by their son Ross Baker, MD of Wild Peacock Fine Food Merchants. We're shown from room to room, some icy, some damn cold, others not quite so cold. Oysters of various sizes from near and far, kept alive and sprightly in endlessly filtrated water tanks. Abalone too. Trucks pull up in front and drive off again to take them to restaurants all over where clever chefs do their work on them before plating them up prettily, scattered with microherbs, also from Wild Peacock. But oysters are a small shellfish in the Wild Peacock pond. Imported Loch Duart salmon and other grand species. Tiny tins of caviar to please every discerning palate. Herring pearls. Most intriguing are shelves of large round containers of mysteries. The brand is Sosa and they're filled with the magical goodies that molecular gastronomers use to make geegaws and whizzbang food. Emulsifiers and aerators. Leavening and fizzing agents. Enzymatic fruit peelers and gelling agents. Fabulous imported and local cured meats and massive boxes of free range eggs. Bee pollen and dried black garlic. And they carry some of our best cheeses, from Dalewood and Klein Rivier to Langbaken and Belnori. Ciao Ciao burrata and Zanetti grana padano. Back in the front shop, Ross opens Saldanha Bay and Lüderitz oysters and wafts black winter truffles past our nostrils, which are now wide awake and ready for anything. A spread of cheeses and cured meats is the final act of generosity before our happy crew have to fade off into our respective days. For Naomi and I, this means we're heading to lunch at VUUR where Ian Downie, friend and gourmand, is to meet us. Naomi and I (and no, she's not related to that Naomi Campbell) were at VUUR when I mentioned in passing that oysters are still alive when we eat them. It hadn't occurred to me to mention this earlier, when she was eating one. She was duly horrified, wide-eyed, but after many Oh-my-Gaaahds and Are-you-seriouses she was still smiling, which she does a lot. She's a stellar student at Syracuse University in upstate New York, and I have the honour of mentoring her until mid-August, a task I am relishing now that I've met and come to know this super-bright, engaging human being. I can't wait to observe her career from a distance. At some point in the next few weeks she will be in Soweto, and more stories will come out of that for my colleagues at Maverick Citizen, but for now — this being last Friday — the task at hand was to review not one, but two restaurants in Stellenbosch. With something like six or seven courses each — at a certain point you stop counting, or are unable to count, or both. But let's start with the first and come to the second next week. It didn't seem like such a big deal when I first accepted an invitation to have lunch at VUUR, and later another to have dinner at Dusk. Lunch is … lunch, right? You start at 12.30, by 2pm you're done, and you have five hours or more to be ready for dinner. Yes? No. Lunch at VUUR was at one. Then ensued one of the most exciting, vibrant eating experiences I can remember and it was 5.30pm when we finally left. Around 4pm I called ahead: 'Can we change our booking to 8pm please? This gave me a space for a brief nap, refreshing shower, and to find the resolve to start all over again. What impressed me was that Naomi took this all in her stride. 'Sure,' she said when asked if she could handle another seven-course meal. Without oysters. At VUUR, chef-owner Shaun Scrooby hosted us in person, at the smallest of their two waterside venues, ably assisted by his super-slick crew of chef bros. This restaurant is refreshingly different. And I felt a kinship with this man, because the fireside is his natural domain, and also because he is self-taught. As am I. But boy is there a lot I can learn from this man. Oh yes: As well as Naomi, I had invited fellow gastronaut Ian Downie to join me, knowing he would be excited by this fiery experience. And he and I duly found our way several times to the open fire where we peered over Shaun's shoulder and quizzed him while watching his flaming wizardry. He and the guys all wear heavy aprons like medieval armour, strange implements stuck in leather pockets, bellies and forearms protected from the scorching Hellpit. But no chainmail as yet; maybe that's on order. Brows are sweaty, arm hair may well be singed. Banter is welcome, so there's a lot of cheeky back-and-forth. It's a bit of a bro-fest, and I climb right in, happy to be a part of it. A massive iron grate far to the rear of the open indoor braai is decorated with a sturdy iron V for VUUR. To the foreground is a grid over red-hot coals over which meat is cooked, just like at my home braai but with more Guy Stuff. Like the implements they've crafted themselves which look like frying pans but with holes in them, like braai grids fashioned into round baskets with long handles. (Or just use a sturdy sieve?) Note to self: buy more Guy Braai Stuff. Vegetables are thrown in a basket and a brave leather-clad arm shoves it into the flames at the back. Something is sprayed on them and whoosh goes the fire. Exciting! Ian and I catch one another's eyes and they're ablaze, like the eyes of little boys playing games they shouldn't. With fire. Outside there's a long table where five of us are sitting. The other two are from Bloubergstrand, an Afrikaner man and his Spanish wife. Temporary friendships form. Signs of Guy Food show themselves early. There's a bone marrow sourdough roll, with rooibos-salted black garlic butter to smear on it, Flippin' naais, as we would say in Cradock. The fish (Cape Point yellowtail) that follows is aged. For 14 days. (Please don't try this at home.) 'It condenses the moisture to the centre of the fish,' Shaun tells us. Yeah. So. If you want to achieve this yourself at your own braai, remember that this guy is not like you and me. He's a master of flame, we are ordinary guys who like to braai. There's braised cabbage and a light mustard sauce, and the cabbage too has been given the flame. Anything not put to the flames here would be sobbing its heart out in a corner somewhere, wailing, 'But what about me, Fire-Daddy!?' There is wine along the way, and an earnest young sommelier called Leroy who, on his first day in a new job, finds himself having to acquit himself right alongside Fire-Daddy who is watching closely but silently. And what does Leroy do? He kills it, absolutely nails it. This wine is a chenin called Honeybunch and is from the farm we're on, which is Remhoogte not far from Stellenbosch, and though it's dry, oddly it has some botrytis in it. Is it a wine at odds with itself? It's a tad unsettling, but the fact that we're thinking about it makes it interesting. And it goes pretty well with the 14-day-aged fish, and maybe that was the point of this pairing. (Nearly all decent wine goes pretty well with nearly all decent food, only some goes better than others, though nobody ever tells you this.) We're served a gin and tonic — an African dry gin from Muizenberg — and the fruit for this is braaied too: naartjies and strawberries. A sweetly shy pastry chef brings out a palate cleanser. It's lemon sorbet in a pool of darkly intriguing syrupy naartjie peels, madly delicious. The next course is Shaun's braaibroodjie, but it's nothing like that one your uncle makes. A supremely crunchy log of bread is topped with beef tartare and tallow. You pick it up, open very, very wide, and hope for the best. There's some on your chin, possibly some on the table and floor, and what you're able to get down is stupidly delicious, especially the tartare. Oh and we're back to wine: Vantage bush vines pinotage to remind me of Beyers Truter and how he made our own red varietal world famous. And now the real meat comes out. Tweetand loin, from that beast at its optimal age for flavour, though sheep farmers will argue for and against this deep into their brandies and Cokes. The meat is divinely tender and so full of lamby flavour that the tweetand wins the argument, hooves down. A yummy gastrique serves as pan juices, slightly acidic, a tad sweet, and meaty; I presume it's a deglaze; it sure tastes like one. Naomi is pescatarian, so she has been given all sorts of lovely not-meaty things, and now she is presented with a gorgeous plate of beans of many colours. 'It's a play on curry beans.' Remhoogte cabernet sauvignon comes out for the next meat course of Wagyu prime rib and sirloin alongside which was a sort of 'African chermoula' that will enchant me forever. It was made of various Things Green including spring onions and nasturtium leaves that had been dipped in fire. Something vinegary in a good way too. But just when I thought this was the best part of it, other than the madly delicious wagyu, I had a taste of wedges of potatoes that had 'been at the back of the fire all day'. Oh and bokkom butter. (Shaun is an ironic Weskus surfer boy whose natural element is not fire, but water.) And what does he do next? He ends this fiery repast with a slice of Basque cheesecake which, if the sweetly shy girl made this too, will have her poached by all and sundry. Beyond sublime. And then, two hours after I thought I would be in my guest house for a nap, a gentle drive back to Bonne Esperance Boutique Guest House, a world-class small hotel in a Victorian villa with a pointy roof, smart elegance in every part of it. I stay in a lot of fancy guest houses, and I'd struggle to think of one that was better than this. Classy yet unfussy. That's the perfect mix for me. And it could not have been better situated for the places I needed to go and people I needed to see in Stellenbosch. I'd forgotten how lovely this old town is — one of the four oldest in the country, along with Cape Town, Swellendam and Graaff-Reinet. I intend to spend a lot more time in this classy, beautiful town. Then the alarm woke me up and, after a quick shower, and I know you're shaking your head now, I was off to meet Naomi again, this time at Dusk, which happily is within walking distance of the guest house. But I need a week's rest before I tell you about that. DM VUUR and VUUR Goose Island, Remhoogte | 083 600 4050 | | The experience at VUUR consists of a seven-course tasting menu that is paired with six Remhoogte Wine Estate wines at R2,450 per person.