A gourmet game plan

Anthony Dennis accompanies chef Neil Perry on a fine-dining safari across the Rainbow Nation.

It's near lunchtime on a terrace overlooking Cape Town's Bantry Bay, and Neil Perry is cooking up a storm, just as a midwinter tempest whips up around South Africa's most captivating city. Clouds envelop a distant Table Mountain, rendering the famous cable car inoperative. Waves pound the rocks below Perry's alfresco kitchen, yet the sun keeps shining above the terrace and on the chef as his dishes, South African style, are enjoyed in this most dramatic of settings.

Lunch is at Ellerman House, a former shipping magnate's mansion that is now one of Cape Town's most luxurious boutique lodgings. Perry, regarded as one of Australia's premier chefs, is barbecuing seafood with his signature Asian flourishes, in concert with Ellerman's head chef, Veronica Canha-Hibbert. The produce includes sweet-tasting crayfish, or kreef; a firm-fleshed indigenous fish called kingklip; soy-marinated yellowtail fish; and root vegetables for a salad. Perry is at the start of a food safari designed to showcase the Rainbow Nation's diverse cuisine, in an itinerary that takes in Cape Town, the Cape Winelands, Durban, Phinda Private Game Reserve and Johannesburg.

Canha-Hibbert reckons visitors tend to be more focused on spotting game in South Africa and tend to have only a vague perception of the nation's cuisine. "Being an African country, we are often seen as serving only African food, such as boma-style open-air meals," she says. "But in South Africa there's a group of highly trained, skilled chefs who are creating a strong food culture and identity."

There's a lot for Australians to love in a country with fine wine, great seafood and where the barbecue, or braai as South Africans call it, is a favoured cooking appliance. Yet what also distinguishes South African cuisine for me is the way in which apartheid can still cast a shadow, even over the dining table. Black South African chefs such as Benny Masekwameng have emerged in the post-apartheid era, but progress has been slow.

Masekwameng was the executive chef at MondoVino at the Montecasino entertainment complex in Johannesburg and one of the stars of the South African version of MasterChef. He cooks with Perry later in the trip at 54 on Bath, a new Johannesburg hotel. While more young black South Africans are studying to become chefs, Masekwameng says their more affluent white counterparts have the educational and economic advantage. For a majority of black South Africans who live below the poverty line, not much has changed on the dinner table. But the middle class, especially in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, are increasingly exposed to global food trends, Masekwameng says.

From Cape Town we head to the Cape Winelands, passing the international airport built for the 2010 Soccer World Cup and kilometres of shanty towns. As hard as it is to witness such pervasive poverty, one of the joys of this tour is the chance to sample the nation's wines in depth. "South Africa has got amazing wine credentials," Perry says. "One of the real positives is that it has a lot of old vines in the ground and you're getting some fantastic maturity there."

While South African drops are referred to as New World wines, the first vines in Franschhoek were planted by French Huguenot immigrants in the late 17th century. Our first stop is lunch at the whitewashed, Cape Dutch-style Grande Provence Estate. A braai is prepared by Darren Badenhorst, the lodge's executive chef, overlooking vineyards framed by mountains.

On the braai are Karoo lamb chops and free-range spring chicken. No braai is complete without boerewors: a traditional and delicious type of sausage.