South Africa’s finest food and wine producers are expanding our understanding of edible and quaffable combinations.
Moses Moloi (the chef-patron of Gigi Restaurant in Johannesburg) and Duncan Savage (the eponymous winemaker at Cape Town’s Savage Wines) have never met. But they should, because their ways of working, and their epicurean output, are strikingly similar. Elegant and complex yet unpretentious and accessible, intervention is skilfully minimalist with ingredients, terroir and a South African sense of self taking centre stage.
Both Moloi and Savage are widely admired for creating focused, fresh flavours that are simultaneously regionally specific and world-class wonderful. Both have won numerous local and international accolades affirming each artisan’s prime positions within their respective spaces.
Savage has regularly received stellar wine ratings in über-prestigious global publications such as Decanter, Wine Spectator and Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate. In 2023 Moloi was listed in 85th position in the top 100 of global platform The Best Chef Awards, which also included Michelin-starred gastronomic greats such as Chef Heston Blumenthal (from The Fat Duck in Bray, England) and Chef Rasmus Munk from Alchemist in Copenhagen.
At the award ceremony (held in Yucatan, Mexico), Moloi encountered Chef Ferran Adrià (the creative force behind the late, great El Bulli modernist restaurant in Spain). It was the Catalan culinary colossus who advised Moloi to “cook who you are and where you are from”. These wise words influenced the Botshabelo-born chef, who had previously focused on Franco-Asian fusion food, to explore his alimentary identity. Since this encounter, he has highlighted the South African flavour repertoire in almost all his work.
Chef Moloi is not in the business of creating museum pieces. He is not a Luddite rejecting modern equipment or a foodie fascist denying the role of outside influences. Just as Ferran Adrià is not cooking as his grandmother once did, but rather attempting to say something about the contemporary Catalan experience, so it is with Moses Moloi.
He says: “I don’t want to mess around with original flavour but at the same time it’s 2024 and we have this amazing establishment, and people’s lives and palates have changed somewhat so you have to find a balance. It’s about communication. Diners should taste and then say ‘this reminds me of my granny or my aunt’ from wherever it might be in South Africa; that’s the idea. That’s the goal that you can somehow relate to the flavour profile and the stories we are trying to tell you.”
Gigi has many beautiful bottles in its state-of-the-art, temperature-controlled glass wine room, but the chef laments that “we have regulars who love a particular red wine and no matter what they are eating they only want that. We have to come to the table and say, ‘how about this with that dish? Why not try something else?’. It’s something we need to work on… There is a massive gap to educate our people… There are so many people with access to money, but their palates are not well trained. They don’t know what wine works with what food.”
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