Harbour House Restaurant, Kalk Bay, Cape Town

Sunday, July 04, 2004

Service: * * * * *
Food: * * * * *
Ambience: * * * * *
Babe Count: * * * * *

Phone: +27 21 788 4133

It's not possible to recommend this place too highly. This is the ultimate restaurant. It has everything. And I urge you to get yourself to it with a romantic partner, and enjoy the sublime.

Tonight, the moon is just past full, and it's sitting above the ocean, smiling in at our window table. Below us, a vast shelf of ocean rock is slick and potent in the silver light. Heather has seen a drunken couple dancing on those rocks. "A wave broke and came up to their knees," she says. "The Polana staff had to go out and save them." (The Polana is downstairs.)

Beyond the rocks, the ocean is raw and excited, and is smashing its way into our hearts, flinging spray at our window, steaming against the floodlight.

"That's weird," I say. "There are airoplanes taking off from Simonstown!" The Cape Town airport is on the OTHER side of the world from where I notice these planes coming from.

Heather looks. No planes. She turns to me, and one takes off.

"There!" I say.

She turns. Nothing. It's gone.

She's busy consulting the homeopathic apothecary in her head, wondering what kind of symptom I'm manifesting, and what remedy might be good for it.

Then I figure it out. The planes are reflections of oncoming cars on the road behind us, their headlights assuming the correct takeoff angle in the window. What a relief. Planes taking off from Simonstown would be very uncool. Cos Simonstown is where South Africa's navy resides. Planes would mean war or something.

Heather and I have established that a holiday romance is not on the cards, and we're just enjoying each others company. But what lovely company we're enjoying.

And the food!

We've opted for their three course menu, at R95 per head. We've both gone for the vichyssoise with blood orange and danya as a starter. It's unbelievably delicious. Heather discovers that if she turns the orange slice over so that the skin is facing up, rather than into the soup, it releases an orange scent that mingles with the food in the most remarkable way.

Then the lamb shank arrives. Ayeeeeeee!!!!!! Oh to live here! Oh to eat this whenever I feel a craving for meat! Oh to enjoy a peasant dish so expertly prepared any time I want!!! You've heard the cliche... the meat just "fell off the bone". Mine does. I touch it with the knife, and it falls off the bone. And then when it goes into my mouth, it kinda dissolves, with only a bit of help from my gnashers. We're both doing the meat frenzy tonight, and Heather is enjoying hers as deeply as I am mine.

My dessert is a thin slice of chocolate mousse, with caramel trickled round therim of the plate. Jeepers. It's evil to subject an ex-chocolate fiend to this kind of violence!

Heather has ordered the pear. Oh my goodness. Yummyness.

And then the evening's over, and it's a short walk back along the seafront to Heather's flat (which has a mountain view AND a seaview from THE SAME WINDOW!!!!!!!), and we kiss a chaste goodnight, and I drive back to Leigh's place.