Popular Joburg eatery Farro reopens on a Cape wine farm

I could have kicked myself when Farro in Illovo, Johannesburg, closed down in June 2020, one of the many casualties of Covid-19 pandemic. In two short years, husband and wife Alex and Eloise Windebank's restaurant had made its mark on Jo'burg's dining landscape.

I’d never eaten there but felt as if I had as friends and colleagues shared their juicy titbits about the delights on the menu. I was never going to taste Alex’s tangy homemade pickles. Nor the most delicious sumac-and-smoked-paprika-spiced beignets.

Or the velvety duck liver parfait served with a splodge of homemade plum jam and brioche toast. A friend called it “such a clever marriage of flavour, the richness of the parfait ... the sourness of the jam”. Or Eloise’s signature delights, the dark chocolate, peanut butter and cream truffles that came with coffee.

So I couldn’t believe my luck when recently I found myself in their new incarnation of Farro on Gabriëlskloof wine farm in Bot River in the Western Cape for Sunday lunch. They’d opened two weeks earlier and, apart from having the pleasure of their excellent food, we had the good-news story of their move.

Eloise manages front of house and chef Alex is the genius in the kitchen. Their aim after the closure of their Joburg restaurant was to find a food career outside restaurants, something less scary and more stable, said Eloise, and they worked in the corporate sector in Cape Town for a while. A chance visit to Gabriëlskloof and coffee with winemaker Peter Allan Finlayson, who had been a regular visitor to Farro in Joburg, was to change their destiny.

“He wanted us to reopen Farro on the wine estate, something that had been in the back of his mind for a while,” Eloise said. “Well here we are. We moved to Bot Rivier having made an enormous life decision in minutes, quite surreal really.”

Their passion for good ingredients is foremost in their minds. Alex speaks of the quality and variety of ingredients they have access to in the Cape.

“We did our best in Joburg with what we could find,” said Eloise. For them it’s wonderful to have access to locally caught seafood through Green Fish, a specialist fish supplier. She talked about a delivery of newly harvested Gabriëlskloof honey that Alex couldn’t wait to turn into Bot River panna cotta. And the excellent artisanal cheeses in the area.

For Farro followers, the good news is the house pickles (R20), sumac beignets (R30) as well as delicious arancini served with a truffle mayo (R40) are on the menu. We enjoyed the nibbles,  well matched with an ice-cold Gabriëlskloof sauvignon blanc 2021, or try their excellent bubbles, Madame Lucy’s MCC.

We went on to enjoy a selection of starters, including the duck liver parfait (R100), this rendition served with quince and brioche. So delicious, creamy and, yes, velvety smooth.