The Restaurant: The Leopard, Melville

In September 2011, the Johannesburg suburb of Parkhurst received a bit of a shock. A restaurant called The Leopard opened there, and it didn't quite fit in.

It did not feature mosaic drinking bowls for Labradors nor finger paints for children. Yet it was packed, because Pringle-shirted Parkhurstians know good food and The Leopard, for all its mismatched tables and vintage crockery, served exceptionally good food - light and bright, a tiny bit Asian but mostly unclassifiable - and ever-changing.

The slightly off-beat Leopard became Parkhurst's top spot, and would be still, had the forces of capitalism not motivated a move to Melville in March. A very good move, as it turned out - more space, more sunlight and more parking in a suburb with a more compatible personality.

The JP Tod-shod brigade followed Andrea Burgener and Nicholas Gordon, more people discovered them, and last month The Leopard was named SA's best bistro in the Eat Out DStv Food Network Restaurant Awards.

On the Friday following the announcement, every lunch table was full. Not necessarily because of the award, says Burgener: "This time of year is always crazy."

Having more space means Burgener and Gordon can limit their opening hours and have more family time (they have three children, the oldest is 10). By all accounts, head chef Leah Tsonye has a large part to play in both the restaurant's success and the family's sanity.

"Regardless of who is on kitchen duty, there should be no difference in the food," says Burgener. "I would not be able to run a restaurant without Leah. She worked in the scullery when we ran Superbonbon. One night I fired a drunk chef and Leah had to help me cook. It turned out she had this extraordinary palate. She'd never eaten Asian food or many of the more Eurocentric things we made, but she started suggesting different flavours for duck sauces and so on. She has this natural gift."

Between them, Tsonye, Burgener and Gordon constantly reimagine the menu, so it's no use giving you a list of what was on it last month, but Ethiopian steak tartare is always in demand. Burgener says she noticed a surge in orders after she demonstrated this dish during a guest appearance on MasterChef SA.

"Suddenly everyone was ordering it, and mostly not people who would normally order steak tartare. They'd seen it on the show and they were being adventurous. My poor kitchen staff - every portion is hand-chopped to order, so it's quite a labour-intensive dish. Normally we'd only do three or four a sitting, but here we were making back-to-back steak tartare."

Diplomatic waiters make sure diners know the steak tartare (R125) is raw before they bring it. I ordered it and it made me wonder why we bothered discovering fire. The texture of the free-range, grass-fed, African-spiced ground beef was somewhere between fragrant velvet and delicate earthworms, if you can imagine that. It was heavenly.

I tasted someone else's porcini hollandaise (R95) and wished I had as many stomachs as a cow (which probably wouldn't have filled its first cavity with steak tartare). Burgener only puts this dish on the menu when she can get fresh porcini, which are flash-fried with garlic and piled on top of potatoes mashed with bright yellow buttery hollandaise sauce. It is richly comforting, even on a hot summer's day. As is The Leopard, all stretched out and at home in its sunny new spot.

• 63 4th Ave, Melville, Joburg, 011 4829356. Open Mon-Fri for dinner; Friday and Saturday for lunch.