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The first ever World Restaurant Awards happened in Paris on February 18, bringing together some of the world’s best chefs and restaurants.

The judges who decided the winners included big names like Rene Redzepi of Denmark’s Noma restaurant, cookbook king Yotam Ottolenghi, and Northern Irish chef Clare Smyth, the first woman to win three Michelin stars in Britain.

In other words, the pressure to impress was off the charts. Under these conditions, you’d expect the top spot to go to a fancy Michelin-starred restaurant in Europe.

Instead, it went to a tiny, off the beaten track restaurant in Paternoster in the Western Cape. Here’s The Citizen, with images below from Inside Guide and Eat Out:

A tiny beach restaurant in an isolated South African fishing village was named the best in the world on Monday.

Chef Kobus van der Merwe, who only learned to cook when he was 30, forages every day for ingredients on the wild Atlantic shore of the Western Cape near his Wolfgat restaurant, where he also makes his own bread and butter.

The Wolfgat just opened last year in a 130-year-old cottage and cave on the beach at Paternoster.

Wolfgat actually opened back in 2017, but that’s still a helluva journey to take in such a short time.

The seven-course tasting menu will set you back R750, which amounts to roughly €53 – a fraction of what you’d pay in a fancy restaurant in France, for example.

The 38-year-old can only feed 20 people at a sitting, which usually lasts two and half hours.

With dishes such as twice-cooked laver (seaweed), angelfish with bokkom sambal and wild garlic masala, limpets, mussels and sea vegetables harvested within sight of its “stoep” (porch), it also won the prize for “Off-Map Destination”.

Bearded Van der Merwe — a former food blogger — said apart from the influence of the subtle spices of local Cape Malay cooking, his philosophy was to “interfere as little as possible with the products, and to keep them pure, raw and untreated.”

Now that he’s brought home the gold, it’s unlikely that his restaurant will be ‘off-the-map’ for much longer.

A huge congrats to chef Kobus and his team for doing us proud on the international scene.

The World Restaurant Awards also made a very cool short video detailing Wolfgat’s story, which you can watch here.

[source:citizen]