Restaurant review: Hemelhuijs, Cape Town

With elegant breakfasts and simple stylish lunches, Hemelhuijs evolves with the seasons

Hemelhuijs’s signature blend of style and simplicity, contemporary flair and evocative nostalgia has gained a loyal following over the years.

Chef and creative spirit Jacques Erasmus takes seasonality to its logical conclusion, not only changing his menu every few months, but also completely redoing the decor, choosing a new colour for the walls and introducing striking new still life arrangements of flowers, branches and vegetable groupings reflecting the new season’s theme.

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We visited during the changeover to the summer menu, the walls having metamorphosed from deep and dark winter green to an earthy cinnamon shade hinting at sunshine and summer-baked earth.

Running to several decorative pages the huge printed menus are themselves works of art with a storyline.

While last winter’s menu featured rich still life photographs inspired by 16th century Spanish painter Juan Sánchez Cotán, for summer, Jacques has gone for a clean feel with graphic leaf and vegetable contact prints, black on white.

“There’s a very vegetal and earthy feeling to the summer menu,” says Jacques. “It’s cleaner and lighter, not saturated with colour, but refreshing and peaceful.

"We try to read where people’s state of mind is. Now is a busy time, everyone’s tired and exhausted, it’s a been a long year. Here they can sit down, relax, and breathe through it.”

The menu mirrors this positive and reassuring mood. Our tuna carpaccio was fresh and light, dressed with rice vinegar and tamari, grounded with thin slices of crunchy daikon radishes from Jacques’s garden in Montagu where he also grows many of his herbs and citrus fruits.

The bright and zesty carrot and mango salad had chickpeas, toasted almonds and crispy caramelised onion (main image). The Hemelhuijs “burger” is like no other: a stack of beef and bacon on rye toast with a rich cognac sauce, while the delicate fried calamari with pineapple and pickled ginger to lift it out of the ordinary is perfect for lazy summer days.

For dessert, a visit to the cake counter presents a difficult choice between a rustic coconut and apple cake, festive layered meringue, or a gluten-free chocolate cake. It’s the art of simple and elegant seasonal spoils that Hemelhuijs does so well.

This article was originally published in one of the Sunday Times Neighbourhood: Property and Lifestyle guides. Visit Yourneighbourhood.co.za, like YourNeighbourhoodZA on Facebook and follow YourHoodZA on Twitter.