Is Bizerka Bistro the best restaurant in Cape Town, and so, by extrapolation, the whole of SA? Certainly my oysters drenched in exotic dipping sauces followed by succulent lambs liver with a grape reduction would be hard to beat anywhere in the continent. To drink, an awesomely citrus Oude Denneboom Chenin Blanc 2009 from the Poor Vaarteberg (Voor Paardeberg for non-Americans) that was so good, Bizerka boss Cyrillia Deslandes (celebrating her birthday) postponed picking up the kids from the Waldorf school for a couple of glasses and mentioned that the Denneboom sales rep should give her a call (021 418 0001) so she may order stock. For the liver, a 2006 vintage Dornier Merlot, whose intense taste of mulberries was more suited to the liver than Tim Adkin’s plump posterior is to a business class sleeper seat on his eternal quest to reduce CO2 emissions in the wine industry.
Cyrillia on her birthday
But enough of this knocking the Special Olympics event going down in Franschhoek next month, the F’Hoek Wine Writers Competition, with potential entrants falling faster than Julius Malema’s bridges in Limpopo Province. The latest casualty is the hugely talented Emile Joubert who will make it two years in a row of not entering on a point of honour. Something Franschhoek may find hard to understand, but if you are paid by a newspaper to write a story, having the chairman of the company holding the organ, adjudicate, is altogether de trop.
This time last week it was lunch at Garuda in Singapore where I had my first cow lung. Green-black in colour, Cyrillia remarked it must have been a smoker. Exotic dishes invariably taste of chicken, but this one tasted of biltong. The couple at the next table were impossible not to overhear, so we were treated to an enthusiastic exposition of the role of money in art. A sneaked swivel view confirmed it was Beezy Bailey who obviously couldn’t resist the alliteration potential of Bizerca Bistro for a double “B” such as himself. If we had a tape recorder, we could have entered it into the Franschhoek affair and hopefully scooped Melvyn Minnaar (himeslf a double “M”) at the Grape communal blog who has transformed alliteration into a flamboyant writing style that puts him as second favourite to win the prize, behind Gad Kaplan.
When it came time to pay the Bizerka bill, I wondered whether Michael Fridjhon’s campaign against Diners Club over dear Clayton Reabow winning the Young Winemaker of the Year Award has not gone far enough (see Bizerka bill, below). Michael himself is an outsider for F’Hoek fame, if he doesn’t get mistaken for Tim James, again! A confusion of identities at last year’s running of the F’Hoek Wine Writers Whistdrive by judge Jancis Robinson that makes a mockery of author anonymity.
