Seating about 45 people, the restaurant is open to outside diners as well as hotel guests. Ten Bompas boasts an excellent wine collection, stored in ideal conditions in our environment-controlled wine cellar. Order from your waitron, or browse the wine cellar for your fancy.

The double volume state of the art wine cellar is home to some 4500 local and foreign vintages. Our 2000 and 2001 bottled reds have been unpacked, dusted off and are now available in the cellar. Over the past few years, Ten Bompas has been a regular purchaser at the annual Cape Winemakers Guild Auction. The Auction wines have to pass a rigorous selection process overseen by a panel of fellow wine makers and are only available for purchase at the Auction.

Sides ranked in the Top 10 in South Africa in the Eat Out Guide 2005

What Victor Strugo (Le Gastronome; The Saturday Star, January 22, 2005) had to say about Sides Restaurant:

The bold and the bountiful
Open: Breakfast, lunch and dinner daily
Brunch Sunday
Cost: Starters: R30 – R48;
Mains: R48 – R80;
Desserts R25 – R30
Seating: 36 Inside
20 Terrace
Contemporary Cuisine rating: * * * *
Stars: 0 avoid; 1 disappointing; 2 average;
 3 good; 4 superior; 5 superb

After last week, I have lots more holiday food experiences to relate but I also want to sprinkle these and other reviews with a retrospective of Joburg’s Eat Out Johnnie Walker Top Ten award winners. Eat Out elicits frequent mentions, which is natural because in recent years this restaurant guide grew in stature to eclipse all local rivals in terms of content and credibility. Joburg’s won four Top Ten awards. Perhaps the least expected was Sides, at Ten Bompas Hotel in Dunkeld.

I reviewed Sides two years ago and, coincidentally, lunched there three days before the Eat Out Awards. A tranquil suburban haven, Ten Bompas ably manages to balance discreet exclusivity with a genuinely warm welcome. Though enjoying a substantial overseas clientele, it has never pitched food prices beyond the local market.

Sides has a modern Afro-minimalistic décor, bolstered by a winter fireplace, an inviting pool terrace and quirky touches such as a unisex washroom. A wine-tasting room is ideal for small functions, which is entirely congruent with the prominence of wine since the modern glass-fronted walk-in cellar is the pride and joy of owners Christoff van Staden and Peter Aucamp.

Though rightfully proud of its top-end Cape Winemakers Guild wines in a 4500-strong cellar, Ten Bompas’s website cannot claim to have “the largest selection in the country” (a distinction emphatically held by The Butcher Shop & Grill) – and doesn’t. A distinctly non-puddingy Yorkshireman, Chef Fred Monaghan’s fresh, original cooking abides by the sound principle of highlighting quality ingredients rather than trying to eclipse with razzle-dazzle chefotechnics (let alone pyrochefnics).

On my latest visit, Fred ably adapted his style, reproducing dishes from Valentina Harris’s latest book, Recipes from an Italian Terrace (priced at R233), with the author and TV celeb-chef in attendance. Valentina was seriously considering making South Africa her second home. When major structural problems in the entire Tuscan village of Tavernelle forced the closure of her famous Villa Valentina cookery school, she fell under the spell of Stellenbosch and a possible new base at Jeremy Ord’s Waterford wine estate.

While nobody could ever displace Marcella Hazan as my concept of divinity in Italian cooking. I can also respect Valentina for understanding, correctly and exactly that “making risotto is like making love”. There are only three risotti in this book, which is characterized by obscenely appetizing photography (I could nose-dive straight into the summer fruit pie or berry semifreddo).

They show off food, not techniques, echoing an Italian formula (simplicity + ingredients = summer pleasure) that’s compatible with South Africa’s climate and unfussy home cooks. Fred prepared our Italian lunch with competence and brio. It consisted of a tomato tart with ripeness, tang, aromatic pesto and the lightest crisp crusts. The alternative (beef, fish and vegetarian) main courses all elicited praises.

To end with, he offered a conical tiramisu with nutty and alcoholic depth, creamy of texture yet light to digest. Dishes were well matched by Kevin Arnold’s superb white and red Sauvignons and natural sweet dessert wine. With Waterford now planting sangiovese and nebiolo, I can see the astuteness of Valentina’s choice for her future projects.

Another seasonally apt book, this time home-grown, is Anette Kesler’s new Fresh & Healthy (144 pages, R162, photos by Franz Lauinger), subtitled Step by Step to Life and endorsed by the Heart Foundation. Uh-oh, a guilt trip? Fortunately not. Far from being an austere, dry diet book, Kesler offers 50 well-though-out original recipes that are zesty and seductive as well as wholesome. Serving analysis (kilojoules, fat etc.) panders to the post-Christmas kilo-losers, nut remember: common sense breeds health; numbers breed neurosis. Chill out. Fresh & Healthy is published by Lannice Snyman, who was for 15 years editor of Eat Out – which brings me back to where I started.

Awards are often controversial, but the accolade for Sides pleased me. Its menu neither stands still nor strives to dazzle, but consistently satisfies. That’s a rare and valuable quality in a trend-obsessed world.

Eat Out’s awards start with restaurant nominations by regional editors (during my eight years in that role, I nominated Sides once or twice) to a panel of judges, who narrow down the final choices.

Such a process will always be subjective (since most judges are human) but, to be done well, personal bias must be contained through a strictly fair editorial policy, a clear notion of required standards and an appreciation of the bold and the bountiful.