Harbour House, Kalk Bay

The view from our table (#83) at Harbour House, at lunch today. One of my favourite places, anywhere. You'd think that good seafood restaurants abound in Cape Town, but that is not the case. Harbour House is what a restaurant on top of the sea should be - bright, airy, consistently well-staffed, both on the floor and in the kitchen, meaning that the service is good and what one eats is delicious. That combination makes for an extremely happy lunch.

We're not sure what this guy was doing*, but it looked interesting. [Ed. 01/13/08 - according to Steve Pike's article in The Weekend Argus, January 12th, this is Stand Up Paddling, fresh(ish) from Hawaii].

Looking towards towards Simonstown.

Above, my mom and I were a bit worried when this arrived: the return of nouvelle cuisine?

...then that arrived...

...from there, below: one and a half Cape crayfish (actually spiny lobster but here they are called crayfish) each, a big piece of very good kabeljou (a local linefish), prawns with heads on and mussels.

Happy campers.

The wine? Since clearly we'd had some...Haute Cabriere's Chardonnay Pinot Noir.

Harbour House Lunch

Kalk Bay Harbour, on False Bay in Cape Town. Our first day in town, having arrived late last Tuesday night, sans all our luggage, which had parted from us somewhere between Jo'burg and Cape Town - but ready for our first lunch. [The luggage was delivered the next day, in two batches]

Choppy bay and wind, and few fishing boats in the harbour, but plenty of determined fishing persons on the quay.

A toast to a reunion, my mom, Vincent and me - the delicious 2008 vintage of Haute Cabriere's Pinot Chardonnay blend.

The pilot, shell-shocked after flying for 18 hours with me and my high-places-with-a-long-way-to-fall phobia.

My favourite Greek salad with a slab of creamy feta...

I had written a fan letter to Harbour House thanking them for being so consistently good over the years, and to our delight we became the recipients of an extra bottle of wine and another crayfish*-and-a-half added to our platter. Largesse.

* In the Cape we refer to spiny lobsters as crayfish, even though that would render them, technically, freshwater crustaceans, which they are not.

Let the games begin. Shell- and finger bowls appeared in due course.

Calamari with chermoullah, kabeljou - local linefish a little like mahi mahi - big prawns and West Coast mussels kept the crayfish company.

So, I have a lot of catching up to do and my camera has been very busy. More to come...

Harbour House, Kalk Bay

Harbour House in Kalk Bay remains one of my favourite restaurants, anywhere. Despite its popularity it has maintained the quality of its food with rare disappointments. Its setting is spectacular, with views over the blue of False Bay to the east and and south, and the loveliest tables, on the part known as the upper deck, are beside floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors. These were open when we went, and iodine air wafted through the whole place. Occasionally a fine mist of spray would drift onto our skin from the breakers crashing onto the rocks beneath us.

We could not help thinking of the great whites cruising their False Bay stomping grounds, as a man had been taken just last week at Fish Hoek, the next beach up. It remains a rare occurrence, but it certainly makes an impression, and we saw few people in the water as we drove home later.

We could see the little harbour's breakwater from our table, packed with people fishing hopefully, and seals fishing rather more successfully, straight from their lines. Later, when we walked down there to see if there were fish for sale off the boats, the scene was less picturesque, with a lot of litter being discarded by the breakwater fisherpersons, despite the trash cans in plain sight, and much of it blowing into the quiet water beyond, through which a fat semi-trained seal swam. His unofficial minder throws fish entrails for him to put him through his paces, and then asks for payment for the show. It's quite a good one, but made me extremely conscious of the apparently obvious Tourist stamped on my forehead.

Below, I don't know this little girl, but she spent lunch behind her grandmother's chair, carefully unpacking , inspecting and sampling all her make-up.

My dad's oysters from Luderitz, in Namibia. One was bad (he sniffs them all) and was replaced immediately.

My favourite Greek salad, with the best feta in the country. My feta quest will continue.

Vince's tuna tartare, delicious despite the shape of the ring mould. I wish ring moulds would be abandoned - they're so...90's.

My mom had crayfish, which is what Cape people called spiny rock lobsters. It is usually very expensive and I think after our wonderful Paternoster kreef (the Afrikaans word for crayfish) last year, I find it hard to shell out the money in restaurants. They do not have the claws of their North Atlantic cousins, but the meat is arguably sweeter, and very delicious. The rest of us had kob (kabeljou, a white-fleshed line fish), and mussels. We ate too fast for pictures. All very well cooked and simple.

The de rigueur double espresso, with perfect crema. If you want a single, you must specify.

Here and There, and There

Jetstreams, crossing.




How many places can one's head be at the same time? Looking out at our cool NY weather today I found some interesting clouds, and wondered whether they had anything to do with Hurricane Dean right now on top of Jamaica, about which I'm thinking because the Caymans lie beyond it and next in the hitline, and lately I've taken to thinking about them too.


And then I found in my Inbox some updated surveillance pictures from the cul-de-sac in Constantia, Cape Town.


Where, the spy wondered, were they going in the chariot? To lunch, certainly but where?




Answer! Harbour House in Kalk Bay. Plus an English/Zambian couple, the English part of whom my dad worked with in Lesotho. And they drank three bottles of wine! And they saw whales in False Bay, from the windows of the restaurant. I love that place. By far my favourite in Cape Town...Delicious fish. One of the loveliest views in the world. I wish I'd been there.



I lifted this off their website. Which is bad. The website, I mean. How, with this location, can one manage to have such BAD photos??? Odd.

Ah... I had no idea. Welcome to South Africa. Herr Goebbels, points out the spy, has upped his security, it seems. Dude, all they'd need is wire cutters, man. I maintain that the houses with zero walls are the safest. T-t-t.

The spy couldn't help itself. It spied on its own view of the sunrise over the greenbelt's mist. Hmmm.

A small suggestion for the spy. A spyblog.

On the trail of the Familiar Bread

It showed up at Harbour House.

Roof garden roses

Getting up to the roof involves climbing up a metal ladder, popping a hatch, and hauling myself up out of it. I go barefoot as this leads me to believe that I'll be more sure footed. When I return I am black-footed, after walking on the neighbour's roof. More about that in another post. The Mystery of the House Next Door (it's where the raccoon lives. But people live there too. In the same house).

I wanted to see what the roses look like from the top. Also, I like rooves. Roofs. Whatever.

There is something very movie-like about New York rooves. Roofs. They are over-certified - see the Walker Percy quote in the side bar, scroll down...They are full of satellite dishes and chimneys, and from this roof you can see New York Harbour, and the orange ferries, the tugboats and their charges, Governor's Island and the big white building on it that sucks exhaust fumes from the tunnel beneath, which connects the southern tip of Manhattan to Red Hook, for cars. You can see the back gardens of the houses behind us, and the trash pile behind the Long Island College Hospital's dormitory for doctors. Far away, across the water, you can see New Jersey, and planes landing at Newark, in the west. To the east, there are church steeples, and tree tops.

And on this roof there are roses.

Iceberg, below.

And New Dawn.

New York to Rockport

Contents of my traveling handbag. Read the new Gary Shteyngart on the train up, despite some misgivings after hearing him interviewed on NPR. Super cocky? It's about a future New York, one about to happen any second. Maybe next week. There are none of the sequences of arresting sentences or novel insights into the (my, our) human condition, that make me return to a book again and again, years later, but there are many compelling sketches of what we are heading towards, society-wise. It's also funny. I didn't find it very sad.

As usual, the cat watched the packing quite closely

Heading through Queens courtesy of our $120 roundtrip tickets on Amtrack from Penn Station to Boston, snaking around to the Bronx.

Goodbye, Manhattan.

Goodbye baseball.


Hello, French fries! At Boston we caught the subway from South Station to North Station and sat at the latter for an hour. There was a Macdonald's. I was feeling moody. So I did it.

THEY WERE GOOD! And I dipped them in ketchup.

Very moody.

And I realize why America is fat. This food is cheap. Unholy cow.

We saw a factory from the little train to Rockport.

And a bicycle hidden in the bushes at a station.

We started to see water and what floats.

And houses right on the tracks.

And signs.

Ponds.

And ponds.

Beautiful water meadows.

We were somewhere different, even from the train.

And then we were in Rockport. We walked to our much subdivided self-catering house, above Back Beach, from the station. We met Yann, Vincent's nephew, who carried my blue suitcases.

It was not at all what I was expecting.

Quite lovely.

The harbour had life to it. Despite the obvious, ambling tourist element (amongst which we numbered - Hippos - more about that later) and the unfortunate frou-frou and frippery that goes with it, there still seems to be an undercurrent of real salt water and work near the water.

Being near people who know what they are doing, in an entirely different element, is mesmerizing, and somehow reassuring.

The small boats on the glassy water reminded me of the Knysna lagoon.

Walking as we did every day after that, on Beach and Main Roads, up through Bearskin Neck, we passed alleyways and triangles between houses situated at angles to face the bay.

Always something to look down, or up. Something at the end.

The sea always to one side.

This shingled house right on Front Beach was my favourite, because of the garden. Apples, fat tomatoes. Unfortunately I spied a spray bottle of poisonous weed-be-gone tucked in a nook.

Rockport is under water restrictions. Perhaps the gardener waters furtively, at night.

Is there a flower decree in town. There Shall Be Flowers? For the Tourists Liketh Them?

Or do people really like them and plant them of their own accord?


Such happy, healthy plants.

A weed-be-gone world? What are the politics of these parts?

In the evening the scent of petunias rose from the flowerboxes.

And outside our modest room at the Beach Knoll with its windows open to the waves, South African nemesias blossomed in profusion. I looked carefully for seed, but I think they must be a seedless hybrid. I'm very sorry about that, because they were gorgeous.

That first night we had dinner with Vincent's extended family, whom he hadn't seen in over a decade, and I kept my head down and slurped my spaghetti at a picnic table while Quebecois French twanged about me. His aunt Marie, uncle Yves, Julie, Peter, the small Vincent and the large; Germaine, his mom, beaming from ear to ear to see her son and sister and nephews and nieces all together again. More family would arrive the next day.

We walked home in the dark, past the beach, and fell asleep quickly to the waves falling on the rocks and the sand in the two bays between which we lay. We slept straight through. Not a single eep from the bad black cat to wake us before dawn, demanding to be fed. Still, I wished he could be there too, sleeping on the seaside bed, on holiday from Brooklyn with his people, who missed him, despite everything.