Move over, frankfurter
The pizza world champ returns home . . . to Germany. In Cape Town, a peanut sorbetto to end all peanut sorbettos. Cavati and fantasy in Plettenberg Bay. A Franschhoek diary.
Bonnes bouches edible and conversational
Franschhoek without Foliage is far from ideal, but the addition of two terrific, newish coffee shops on the same strip goes some way to perking one up. Especially when Eliisa Graney, co-owner with her husband, Darren, of Get Lost Coffee, tells you the offer she’s historically made to those who could correctly guess the spelling of her name: a blowjob. She’s a good sport about letting me divulge this titbit when I check with her afterwards. “However, as long as you know that my conversation starter is forever ruined; Darren won’t mind though!”
The Graneys used to own a ceramics business in Johannesburg called Andersen Ashby Studio before they packed up and moved to Franschhoek in September 2019, where they opened a small ceramic gallery while retaining their manufacturing base in Jo’burg. Covid led to their closing the business a year later, and opening their Scandi-inspired coffee shop in November last year with beans from Cape Town’s EspressoLab (Eliisa’s mother is a Finn and there’s a tribute to Finland’s flag in the arrangement of the tiles on the bar counter).
Eliisa’s always been into baking and she makes the cakes and munchies for the shop, while Darren gets to grips with the Kees van der Westen espresso machine they purchased from the owner of the now-defunct Doubleshot Coffee Bar in Plettenberg Bay (see the archive piece at the end of this newsletter).
Darren mentions, when I pop in for the second day in a row for one of Eliisa’s giant chocolate chip cookies, that in the six months the shop’s been open, they’ve both shed weight just from being on their feet for 11 hours a day. Darren dropped seven kilograms and Eliisa eight. “Literally without adjusting our diet,” she says.
Further down the road is Terbodore, the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands coffee company that now has its primary roastery and flagship café in Franschhoek. In Cape Town it’s difficult to find its coffee for sale in whole bean form, but here, the full range in its divinely tactile packaging is on display: a veritable bounty of chocolate, caramel, hazelnut, toffee and vanilla scents. I could happily keep my nose pressed to the “birthday cake” bean bags all day.
A Wiesbaden connection of mine, Frank, is in town to meet with suppliers for his South African wine shop in Germany. After sundowner G&Ts with Mediterranean and African botanical gins from the Cape Town-based Hope Distillery, a gin brand he’ll import for the first time this summer, he heads off to the opening party of the newest outpost of the Grand group of restaurants at Dieu Donné.
The next day, my mate Mo drives in from Cape Town and we head off to the wine estate next door, Chamonix, to have lunch at Richard Carstens’ restaurant there. Arkeste used to be Racine, one of many eateries in local chef Reuben Riffel’s empire (Riffel has partnered with Carstens in Arkeste). Before arriving in town, I had asked the former owner of Le Quartier Français, Susan Huxter, for her recommendations and she suggested this spot as well as Protégé and La Petite Colombe.
Not fancying a totally over the top fine dining experience, we opt for Arkeste where the menu is à la carte and one sits in the middle of a forest on the deck of what feels like a Swiss ski chalet (a tree trunk weaves its way between two window tables inside).
Mo’s starter arrives and it’s a bunch of arty-looking clumps of seafood arranged in a snail shell-type spiral. He’s instructed to eat them in an anticlockwise direction, starting with the oyster braised in MCC. What happens if they’re eaten in the wrong order, he enquires. “Are there cameras?”
Also lunching there that day, presumably not as cheekily, is Marthinus Ferreira, the owner and former executive head chef of dw eleven - 13, which is the only fine dining restaurant in Jo’burg, he tells me. At the moment, Ferreira is flying back and forth between dw eleven - 13 and his soon-to-be opened restaurant at Jordan Wine Estate. He mentions he’ll be fully moved down to the winelands by the end of May and hopefully will start operating in September.
Ferreira is from Jo’burg, studied in Stellenbosch, then returned to Jo’burg and now he’s returning to Stellenbosch. I email him afterwards to find out what he ate, considering Carstens appeared to be sending out a never-ending stream of dishes to his table. The list includes crispy prawns and beans, 42-degree tuna, a Franco-Japanese dish, duck tails and couscous, and the beef main. “Too full to have pudding”, he adds.
Flipping dough and kicking ass,
Super Champion style
“‘To know a territory, you need to eat it,’ the great Italian writer Italo Calvino once wrote. Keep this in mind the next time you twirl capellini around your fork, bite into a piping hot pizza, or savor a dish of steaming risotto. That’s not just food you’re eating. It’s Italy.”
– from La Bella Lingua by Dianne Hales
On a Sunday late last year, a couple drove from Berlin to the small medieval town of Ingelheim to have lunch. And then after lunch they drove home. “They travelled 1100kms for two pizzas,” said Pizzeria Capri owner Francesco Ialazzo.
Then again, if you want pizza that is made by the reigning world champ, a small town in the Rhine-Main area that’s home to an 8th century imperial palace and the headquarters of global pharmaceuticals giant, Boehringer, is where you’re going.
Pizzeria Capri used to be pretty popular, producing around 500 pizzas a day for eat-in and takeaway. Since Ialazzo became the official Pizza World Champion in September last year in a prestigious annual contest in Italy, the restaurant produces double that. Customers now make pilgrimages from all over the country and there’s a three-week wait for a table.
It’s never happened before that a German pizza maker has won this championship. In seven categories (Neapolitan, classic, gourmet, dessert, gluten-free, contemporary and one-metre) judged by three former world champions in each category, Ialazzo ranked number one in the first four on that list and second in the remaining three. Of all of the frontrunners in each category, cumulatively he was awarded the highest number of points, earning him the overall title of “Super Campione”. This title is displayed on a giant, gleaming trophy that sits on the bar counter at the entrance next to an even bigger, shinier trophy declaring him number one in the “Classificato Categoria Pizza Napoletana”.
Ialazzo’s path to German, European and, finally, international pizza domination started unexpectedly and somewhat reluctantly with a man named Luigi. Luigi was working in Stuttgart for an Italian industrial food supplier. His job was to deliver bread to pizzerias. On a stop in Ingelheim, he tried to sell bread to Ialazzo. Ialazzo told him he made his own bread but since Luigi was there anyway, why didn’t he sit and have a pizza. Luigi later exclaimed that he had never eaten such a great pizza in Germany.
It may just have been the gratitude talking but then he suggested that Ialazzo join a national pizza making competition. Ialazzo said no thanks, but Luigi entered him in it anyway.
The outcome certainly couldn’t have appeared auspicious when Luigi came to him one day and announced that the next day they would be joining the competition 640kms away. Ialazzo worked in his takeaway pizzeria till 11pm that night. He took two balls of dough with him the next morning to arrive at the contest, “very tired”, at 8am, to discover that 250 of the best pizza makers in Germany had already begun.
A head start clearly wasn’t enough: that day, in 2009, Ialazzo became the German champion with a pizza called the Sofia, named after his middle daughter who was one month old at the time. “Das ist die Sofia: meine Tochter,” he said, gesturing to the original Sofia who at this stage has bounded into the restaurant. The pizza features buffalo mozzarella, Italian sausage, cherry tomato and cabbage leaves and it shares top billing on the menu at Pizzeria Capri with the top 10-winner he created in Parma at the Pizza World Championship of 2014. Luigi also has a pizza named for him with green pepper, mushroom, pepperoni sausage and cooked ham.
As unlikely as that initial contest played out considering the way it began, Ialazzo’s fortune as a pizza maestro seemed destined from early on. At age eight every Saturday and Friday after school he was baking pizza in his parents’ restaurant. His uncle had positioned him in front of the stove “and that’s how it started”.
Ialazzo’s parents are from Sicily. They moved to Germany for work before he was born. He grew up in Mainz, a small university city nearby, in a multi-storey house with Italians on every floor. At school he spoke German and at home only Italian (his Italian is accent free). When Germany plays Italy in football, he supports Italy.
“When I’m in Germany, I’m Italian. When I’m in Italy, I’m German,” he laughed. In Spain, he’s also German (Spanish completes the trio of languages he speaks).
His wife Maria’s parents are from Pompeii and they also moved to Germany before she was born. Fittingly, Ialazzo and Maria met by chance in a pizzeria: she was a customer, he was working there. They speak German at home with each other and their three teenage daughters as they “feel German”, but Chiara, Sofia and Pia understand Italian. The five family members all have pizzas named for them. Chiara is blond, so Ialazzo added corn to hers.
Ialazzo opened his first pizzeria in 2006: a takeaway joint in Ingelheim at Marktplatz 8. He’s now at Marktplatz 11. Why Ingelheim? He asks himself that question too, he replied. Maria’s father, who was also in the restaurant trade, had mentioned that there was a pizzeria for sale there and so he bought it.
Everyone who works at Pizzeria Capri is Italian – generally Sicilian and Neapolitan – and trained by Ialazzo. With several formal instructing qualifications, he plans to open a pizza school in Frankfurt that will offer a course of 120 hours every three months. Once enrollees finish that, they will be given the opportunity to work as interns in his restaurant “to learn how to work under pressure”.
Before Ialazzo himself learned to work under pressure, arriving for on-the-job training at the source in Naples, he had been producing Roman style pizza – a very thin, crispy crust that can be industrialised – “not the real pizza”, he said.
For Neapolitan style pizza to be authentic – apart from aspects such as the oven temperature, cooking time, room temperature, flour expansion time – the ingredients must come from the Campania region near Naples. The tomatoes have to be from San Marzano in Campania. And those tomatoes need to be pummelled a certain way because otherwise the seeds crack and make the sauce bitter.
There are two Naples-based associations devoted to its recognition and protection: the 100-year-old APN, founded to promote the style of the Neapolitan pizza in the wake of American and Roman style pizza; and the AVPN that sticks to the old tradition of Neapolitan pizza. Producers who make anything other than margherita or marinara versions can’t belong to it.
The well-known L’antica Pizzeria da Michele in Naples only makes these two types. At 18, Ialazzo spent a couple of years in Naples, most of it there learning the traditional, handcrafted method: how the stove worked, what wood to use, how to achieve the correct temperature. He recalled that at da Michele, they produced up to 1000 pizzas a day. It was during that time he realised he could work very fast, handling the dough quickly, which came in handy with the hungry line of customers waiting outside – a not dissimilar situation to the one he encounters at his own pizzeria now.
During his working stint in Naples and on a later trip to observe the experience more carefully, he ate in the restaurant of Neapolitan pizza legend and multiple world champion Umberto Fornito: a treat and tribute to the man who would become his mentor. Recently, Fornito returned the favour.
Cultish consumption: Moro Gelato’s peanut paradiso sorbetto
As a photographer in the Italian fashion capital of Milan, one could assume that Stefano Moro has endured his fair share of histrionics. But it’s in his Capetonian work life as the co-owner of a three-parlour gelato operation where he encounters the really tricky subjects: peanuts.
“It’s a nightmare,” he says. “The peanuts love to attach their fat to the water so if it attaches too much, that’s when you have a rock, and if it doesn’t attach properly, then it only makes lumps and then it separates.”
Each flavour at Moro goes through either a fairly quick development, testing and rollout process (such as fior di latte) or an arduous, excruciating, tumultuous trial such as the peanut paradiso sorbetto, whose existence is the very embodiment of the aphorism good things take time.
Moro’s partner and Moro Gelato co-founder Heine van Wyk said the peanut sorbetto took the longest of any of their flavours to perfect because they’d make it and the consistency would seem fine. Then it would go to the shops “and after a week the staff are, like, we’re breaking our utensils.”
“It’s very fatty to begin with so if you want to add anything else you either dilute the flavour or it just congeals,” Van Wyk elaborates.
“You also have to heat it up slightly because you have to activate those peanut fats to react with the sugar and the water,” Moro says. “If you’re on the wrong temperature, it doesn’t activate, and if it goes too high, you basically cook it and destroy the flavour. It’s stressful.”
And in machine grinding the nuts, you get the desired effect in the buttery texture, but the resultant heat that develops “starts destroying the subtlety of the flavour,” Van Wyk adds, creating resounding consensus on what a pain in the ass a peanut can be.
Hazelnuts from Piedmont feature in a number of the gelati and sorbetti, including one called bacio di dama that is selling “like crazy”, Moro says. Apparently hazelnuts and peanuts work differently chemically, and the hazelnut is a more malleable ingredient to contend with. While the pistachios they use come in a paste – having been ground in Sicily in a sophisticated apparatus involving dozens of steel bowls that cold processes them to a micro level – making it an exceedingly well behaved ingredient.
The very peanutty taste aside, the creaminess of that sorbet as well as the others Moro produces might ignite wonder among those who assume that cream and milk is quite integral to the experience of what makes ice cream taste like ice cream.
“A lot of people hear the word ‘sorbet’ and immediately are repelled by memories of iciness,” Van Wyk says. “That’s why we simply put ‘sorbetti’, because sorbetto is not sorbet; ice cream is not gelato. It’s two different ways of doing things,” Moro adds. “Sorbetto is a word that goes back centuries. It’s basically a water-based gelato. If it’s a nut one, you have the fat of the nuts while in the fruit ones, it’s the pectin of the fruits. Real fruit has a lot of fibre and pectin.”
Their lemon meringue gelato might take second prize for the trickiest to master. To make a proper lemon curd that is not overly sweet and that doesn’t freeze below zero took multiple attempts. That’s one of the South African-inspired flavours, along with herzoggie cookie, milk tart and rooibos tea. Then there’s colomba, a nod to the Italian Easter cake, served only for several weeks round Easter.
The flavours and their creators are proof positive that delicious things happen when Italians and South Africans get together. Van Wyk was working in the same industry in Milan, as a model, when he met Moro. They decamped to Cape Town and as these things tend to go, set up shop after a visit by Moro’s father left them with the joint view that Cape Town was a gelato wasteland.
“South Africans have more and more refined taste because they are exposed to amazing chefs, more and more, so they’re very excited about good stuff. So there was a gap to present good stuff also on the cold side. Because we still cook, but we cook below zero,” Moro says.
Despite his assessment of the gelato scene, Moro’s dad gave the raw ingredients he found locally top marks. “Your milk is fantastic, your cream is fantastic, your fruits are excellent – actually in Italy we get summer South African fruits,” Moro explains. “When the mangoes come, it’s a party in the kitchen.”
For a long time the duo didn’t offer vanilla. Instead they served what is considered in Italy to be vanilla: the pure milk and cream white flavour of fior di latte. But then a chef asked them to make a vanilla to serve in his restaurant. “And then we had to make the best one,” Van Wyk laughs. “And then,” Moro adds, “everybody in the kitchen was, like, you need to make this for the shops.”
From the archive: more Italians cooking up a storm
Seventy years ago, Italians started creating a restaurant culture in Cape Town. Before they opened their trattorias, the only places to dine out were tearooms, clubs, hotels and pubs, where an à la carte menu was unheard of. Italians not only pioneered the modern way of dining out in the city, they introduced Capetonians to pasta and gelato and espresso: veritable exotic items in the Cape Town of the 50s and 60s.
But more than the sort of food and drinks they offered, they brought with them a new way of eating and drinking – that quintessential Italian way of socialising, where food turns a meal into a party. As John Dickie writes in Delizia! The epic history of the Italians and their food: “Italian food is city food. Italy has the richest tradition of urban living on the planet, and the enviable way in which Italians eat is part of that tradition.”
In early 2018, I wrote an article about a trio of Italian restaurateurs in the Garden Route town of Plettenberg Bay. It was published in the Eastern Cape newspaper, the Weekend Post.
'To know a territory, you need to eat it,’ Italo Calvino.....so true
entertaining read...:)