Queen Victoria famously draped her tables with shawls and antimacassars to hide the nether regions of diners, while piano legs were considered quite scandalous.

So I was intrigued to check out the furniture at Dash, the restaurant of her namesake boutique hotel which opened on the embankment of the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town earlier this month.

Fashioned out of battleship-grey steel, rather like the battleships that helped secure Her Majesty an empire on which the sun never set, the tables at Dash are as naked as imperial ambition.

"At last a table that doesn't wobble," commented dashing food and beverage manager Alton van Biljon. And while Her Majesty most likely would not have been amused, she would have been by the name of the restaurant: Dash - for "darling Dash" was her favourite King Charles spaniel.

Naming a restaurant after a royal dog is not a subtle cue to tourists from South Korea where gaegogi (dog meat) is still very much a treat. Dash is also West African slang for a bribe, and given the popularity of near neighbour the One&Only with gravy-train politicians, let's hope the only brown paper packets will be departing doggy bags.

On the positive side, Dash is just one vowel away from Dish, Andrea Foulkes's upscale catering company and the resident chef is of that rarefied ilk. And executive chef Stephen Templeton worked for Terence Conran and the Mount Nelson before taking a 4½-year sabbatical in Montagu where his namesake restaurant was one of the jewels of Route 62.

Invited to dinner, I had expectations high enough to take along a bottle of the best champagne in the world. Called Ace of Spades, this is the replacement bubbly for Cristal after US rapper Jay-Z spat the dummy when the MD of Louis Roederer Champagne, Frédéric Rouzaud, told the Economist he viewed his brand's association with rappers "with curiosity and serenity".

A snobbish put-down that exploded in his face like a bottle of bubbly opened by a drunk with a rusty sabre.

For Rouzaud's ruminations were headed "unwelcome attention" in the magazine, prompting Jay-Z to call him a racist and launching a boycott of Cristal that had previously made him "pissy-pissy". Now he was just pissed-off.

Officially called Armand de Brignac Brut Gold, Ace costs as much as a night at the Queen Victoria and is worth it - it buried Dom Pérignon 2000, Roederer Cristal 2002 and even Pol Roger Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill 1998 in a 2009 blind tasting of 1000 bubblies conducted by Fine Champagne magazine.

It worked a treat with my starter of beetroot-cured salmon; the rich and creamy strawberry mousse complementing and contrasting the earthy sweetness of the beetroot, and it had the depth of flavour to take on the sea bass main course.

Named after a pooch, perhaps, but Dash is no kennel as there are Beezy Bailey oil paintings on the walls. Bailey is famous for being famous and his masterpiece is a public friendship with rock star David Bowie. Bowie's best song is Diamond Dogs - and there were quite a few of those at dinner, too.

. Read Pendock Uncorked at http://blogs.thetimes.co.za/pendock