[imagesource: Sotano/Facebook]

Brendon Crew isn’t new to the restaurant business – like a Capetonian version of Chili Palmer out of Get Shorty, oozing into town in a segue from his shylock practice. He and his partners have bona fide credentials in keeping Capetonians and our guests well-fed and watered having put in spells at the Cape Grace, Ellerman House and the Mount Nelson.

Cape Town lacks specialist owner-run seafood restaurants with a view of the sea. Too many places with the best aspects are run by chains more interested in profits than products. I always prefer owner-run restaurants with authenticity and where whoever is responsible for delivering my food is more directly aligned with the quality of my experience.

Brendon and the team have identified this gap and adjusted the Mouille Point staple, Sotano’s focus into the seafood segment. There are few better experiences than fresh seafood and cold white wine on a sunny day in summer, with verdant lawns of the promenade, the red and white Cape Town lighthouse and the blue Atlantic providing the backdrop.

Tourists looking to unwind after another traumatic year in this increasingly bizarre world could do a lot worse than spending time here in the relaxing company of Cape wines and pescatarian delights. The irreplaceable Wakame was wonderful and absurdly, no one has sought to replicate its success in this area. Until now.

Mouille Point has become a smart seafront suburb with direct access to the Cape Town stadium, the superb Urban Park, the Metropolitan Golf course, a tennis club, gyms, a sneaky surf break and the Promenade. The Waterfront is around the corner for the freaks who get off on spending money on things that you don’t need with thousands of other people.

I lived in Mouille Point for a few years before parenting pushed its way to the front of the queue, forcing us to give up our sea-facing apartment, along with many of life’s finest comforts. It seems to me that this area is ideal for relative youths with no kids and retirees who have been released from the financial burden of supporting a brood who absorbs Rands like blotting paper. This is fortunate for restaurateurs since these demographics are likely to have a few shekels left over to spend in restaurants.

Oddly, Mouille Point’s popular restaurants seem to specialise chiefly in steak. I am not sure about you but I don’t get an urge to feast on red meat and sip room-temperature claret while I gaze at the ocean in summer. Eating what is in the ocean appears to be a more natural urge. I suppose this has evolved into the choice departments of our brains since standlopers sat on the beach, munching on shellfish and then left the shells behind to form middens. There is also a school of thought that early humans on the Cape Coast diet of shellfish changed our physiology, providing our brains with more natural materials to develop.

I was lunching with a friend who lives in Washington and works at a large bank in the development finance business. He looked like he had been hit by a baseball bat. He is not even American, but the visceral blow to anyone interested in saving the world is still reverberating from Trump’s landslide. Perhaps they should start feeding Americans more shellfish. Some Strandloping would be good for them too.

We chose to sit inside. My guest would have preferred outside, absorbing the sun, with the other tourists, but a sneaky breeze was blowing that I was not prepared to endure in order to increase his vitamin E intake. Nevertheless, we chatted about current affairs of mutual interest, including how to stop The Donald and the Chinese from burning down what remains of the earth and stared out at the pleasant colour combination I have already described, with the sea in the background, while subconsciously ruminating over the menu.

We tried several dishes. Not only because we are greedy, but because we felt an obligation to the reader to provide feedback on a variety of the items on the menu. Although, we didn’t order the whole menu. That seemed excessive.

The calamari tasted as it should, rubbery, fresh and laced with enough garlic and lemon butter to enjoy with the rice afterwards. Then a platter of prawns arrived – pink and springy, tasting of the sea, despite their unfortunate diet.  Then we sampled a seafood marinara which found particular favour with my Canadian guest. The line fish was wonderful.

 

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We also felt obliged to sample a variety of items off the wine list. We are, after all, professionals. The journey began with a crisp rose and moved through the gears towards some delightful Chenin, with some chard to finish us off.  In retrospect, I suppose our mistake lay in finishing all the food and the wine, rather than just having a sip or a taste of each. This business of being a critic takes some getting used to.

We were deciding if we should review another wine on the list when Nine-Mill Bill showed up.  Nine Mill was a fine sportsman and a menacing lothario in his day who drove a souped-up Golf GTI with exhausts the size of four-bore shotguns and a sound system that could outgun a nightclub if he pulled up outside. He had jilted me while I was at university but not even that emasculating memory could stop us from inviting him to break bread with us and share some wine over stories about cricket.

Sotano’s is the sort of place where bygones really can be bygones, particularly after an afternoon of diligent critique in the clear Cape light just before dusk. Besides, it turned out that the jilting was inadvertent.