The uncustomarily modest dimensions of this chef frame a massive talent, yet the humble Richard Carstens took time out of his madly busy schedule to take on the challenge to produce a skaapstertjie dish worthy of a top menu. He did it with aplomb – and ...
Richard Carstens is a chef among chefs. He was making Insta-worthy plates of food long before Instagram had been invented. The word “grammable” could be applied to every single dish he has ever made. Yet he somehow remains humble, a mensch, unassuming despite his massive talents and achievements. He’s a good man and a great chef.
He was keen to hear my opinion of each and listened with rapt attention to my notes. I say notes because I felt a bit like a director giving notes to an actor after a dress rehearsal; you don’t interrupt the action until it’s curtain-down, because it’s the final rehearsal before opening night; you sit quietly at the back of the theatre, taking notes, then sit down with the actor afterwards and go through them. Except that in this case, the “actor” knew far more than the director.
His airy Franschhoek space is on Chamonix farm where, in the Nineties, he shot to fame while cheffing at La Maison de Chamonix, across the road from the forest-edge venue where he is now, and where the then unknown Reuben Riffel was a young kitchen hand who showed a lot of interest in cooking methods. Earlier, he had been under the wing of the legendary Ralph van Pletzen at his Ralph’s restaurant in Stellenbosch.
There was inevitably going to be something interesting in the ice cream department at that early February lunch. Past incarnations include gorgonzola ice cream, smoked salmon ice cream, mustard ice cream and what else but garlic. The last was also on the menu at Le Japon in Melbourne. The Baked Alaska was born in 2000 and has remained on his menus, unchanged, ever since. Two years older, spawned in 1998, is his Franco Japanese Interpretation. This dish has evolved since then; the recipe for the current incarnation of it runs to three pages and comprises an oyster, a mussel, a prawn, calamari, black rice, sushi rice, nori, ponzu, linefish, and a miso marinade. But that isn’t the half of it.
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