An influx of world-class innovative talent has transformed Hermanus from a sleepy coastal resort into a bucket-list destination, writes Ryan Vrede.
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I last spent meaningful time in Hermanus almost 11 years ago. At the time, it was a quaint little town South Africans ventured to for brief breakaways, and the rest of the world flocked to off the back of decent tourism marketing. It offered good food, sea and some of the best whale watching on the planet around this time of year.
This Hermanus is different. It is a world-class destination populated by impossibly gifted creatives and entrepreneurs who’ve created a broad swathe of dope stuff. I’d imagine the Mona Lisa would look like this Hermanus if Andy Warhol had trained his lens on it. Familiar in ways that retain its historic charm but completely unrecognisable in others. It has a magnetic appeal for travellers whom this type of juxtaposition excites. It was so magnetic that I returned a week after an initial media trip to take in this emerging jewel in our tourism crown more fully.
I write this piece from Dal-Italia, an Italian deli in Hermanus. I may be in a deli in Northern Italy. I came here to buy a few authentic Italian pizza bases, but as I tap away at my keyboard, the owner, Fabio Lenci, is making me a Prosciutto di Parma and pecorino cheese sandwich with store-made pesto and balsamic glaze on fresh ciabatta. I think he’s adding artichokes. I’m not asking any questions because he speaks with the type of authority that only Italian cooks can. Furthermore, it’s 11.37 am, yet I’m on my second glass of wine, on Fabio’s insistence but mainly attributable to my awful self-control when it comes to good wine. I’m not driving, I argue with myself.
I’m walking to the nearby cliff paths, a 12-km stretch along the Hermanus coast that features a clutch of art installations from local artists. I’ll eat my sandwich there while watching whales frolicking in the bay. That and the sea breeze will diminish my wine- induced condition, I reason. The sandwich, whale-watching experience (southernrightcharters.co.za) facilitate closer encounters, and art are beautiful in equal measure, and the sea breeze did what I needed. I spent the rest of the day revisiting some of the spots I and a group of journalists had been introduced to a week earlier by Susan Mann, who heads up Eat Like a Local.
Susan hosts walking tours in Hermanus that explore a range of off-the-beaten-track culinary gems, art galleries, and a handful of stores hidden in the town’s labyrinth of alleys that are difficult for out-of-towners to navigate. Susan is how I discovered Dal-Italia and is also responsible for my addiction to the world’s best croissant at Black Magic on High Street. It bulges with cheese, Marmite, and cocaine. Marmite is divisive, so I fully understand if you don’t share my appraisal of this as the meal of the gods. Humbly, you’d still be wrong, but there are plain or orange and almond options for less discerning palates. I kid. Maybe.
I met its creator, Emilia Knight, while in Hermanus. She’s a South African who left in the ’80s to live in Europe, where she met her Scottish husband, who she playfully describes as a ‘lager lout’. After 17 years in Europe, she returned to South Africa, where she settled in Hermanus and opened the town’s first plant-based eatery. A friend suggested she stock croissants, which she could buy frozen and pop into the oven. ‘If I don’t know what goes into them, it won’t work,’ she snapped. That was the catalyst for a two-month trial-and-error process that culminated in her first successful batch, infused with what she says is the key ingredient – French butter. It is handmade over three days and tastes like it was crafted with great care.
Advocations for the cheese-and-Marmite variant aside, Emilia, who also owns Hame – a restaurant- slash-whisky bar that is one of three Scotch Malt Whisky Society partner bars in South Africa – embodies the spirit of new entrepreneurs who are transforming Hermanus in fundamental ways. Across the street from Hame is Mikro Coffee Co, an award-winning roastery co-owned by Wihan and Lise Brink. The couple trained as chefs in Franschhoek and had extensive experience in wine before setting their hands to coffee. ‘When we got to Hermanus in 2018, there was no local coffee experience we loved. After complaining to friends about this, we decided to buy a tiny roaster and turned our one-bedroom into a mini roastery,’ Wihan explains.
They slowly developed their roasting ethos and personality, and now mainly stock single-origin beans.Their award-winning offering spans an everyday range, reserves, limited editions and a Columbian bespoke range. Each range comprises three single origins and one blend. For the record, this coffee, paired with a cheese and Marmite croissant… my pleasure.
I’m not sure what I expected from Hermanus before my arrival. I wasn’t naive and expected it to have evolved. But what I got was what felt like a slice of the best creative and culinary experiences of Cape Town and Jozi crammed into a small town: a revolution.
I’d need more space than the editor of this magazine can grant me to extol all Hermanus’ culinary virtues. I can’t do justice to the experience at Rickey Brookhaven’s Onshore Eatery, where, early one morning, I fed my soul on their trademarked ‘Familiemeel’, a maize-based porridge served with cinnamon syrup and farm butter that felt like a hug from my late grandfather. I took home a loaf of sourdough made in an eight-year-old wood-fired oven nicknamed Nikita. Excellence is in the details, and my ‘Familiemeel’, made using Lowerland organic, non- GMO maize flour, stone-milled from whole-kernel yellow maize, underpins this assertion.
Indeed, Hermanus’ new wave of creatives all share this attention to granular details. That and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the product, as is possessed by Gary van der Walt, from Wine and Co, where I found limited, unique collections and winemakers’ private labels, focusing on local wine routes, including Hemel-en-Aarde, Botrivier and Stanford. I found a similar authentic passion at Station, where the owner and chef Simon Watt- Pringle, who trained at Silwood before working his way up through La Petite Colombe, Chef’s Warehouse and La Colombe, expresses his culinary gifts in the most beautiful and unexpected ways (try the seared yellowfin tuna with nectarines and pair it with Christine Stevens’ organic sencha green tea blended with locally grown shiso Japanese mint).
I had one of the best steak experiences of my life at Char’d, where Petri Hendriksz and his team specialise in unusual cuts and a meticulous dry- ageing process.
People. People connect with people before they connect with products. And while the array of products in Hermanus is exceptional, your experience will be shaped by the quality of the people who have created these products.
I could spend another four paragraphs detailing why you should stay where I stayed, The Marine Hotel. But those would largely be wasted words, given that the myriad luxury stays available to you and your family in and around Hermanus boast similarly world-class service, accommodation, dining and spa treatments. However, The Marine’s value is in the gifted staff whose passion for their work translates into an excellent guest experience. The hotel’s architecture acknowledges its 122- year history, but the past meets modernity in every metric that matters to the discerning traveller. And its people are the fuel that powers the memory- making machine right on the coastline.
My breakaway ended in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley at Creation Wines, where I sampled their Creation Winter Journey Wine and Food Pairing Menu. It is a love letter to the culinary arts. Their cool-weather wines marry beautifully with meals made almost entirely of locally sourced ingredients. Your at-table experience is amplified by your surroundings’ breathtaking beauty, Creation at the foot of the Babylonstoren Mountain and the restaurant littered with art installations.
Yet, for all those virtues, once again, the people made the biggest imprint on me. At lunch, I’d shared with the owner, Carolyn Martin, that I suffer from a chronic autoimmune condition characterised by painful inflammation of some joints. She said she suffers from a similar condition, has found relief in dietary interventions, and explained the winter menu was designed with anti-inflammatory foods at its core.
A few minutes later, she excused herself and returned with a bottle of natural anti-inflammatory tablets. She took a few out and handed them to me, saying, ‘These have changed my life.’ And now they’ve changed mine.
Carolyn would continue to detail some of the social responsibility projects Creation is involved in, including The Pebbles Project, which includes the provision of Early Childhood Development Education, an after-school care programme, and transportation for the 120 children aged one to 13 who are enrolled. Then there’s the purposeful career development of their culinary team, which includes international internship programmes at top European restaurants.
For me and most others – people matter more than products. And it has been my experience that good, gifted people make the best products. That was the Hermanus I experienced: a town defined by the quality of the people and the products they create. I’m unsure what the next phase of the revolution looks like. Talent attracts talent, so I assume the creative collective will swell in the years ahead. I hope they understand and preserve the prevailing ethos because it is exceptional.
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