Le Quartier Francais is considered one of the best restaurants in the Western Cape and also regularly appears in the top 50 restaurants in the world, so I was more than happy we’d managed to get a table, albeit in the outside ‘Bistro’ rather than the inside ‘Restaurant’. Unfortunately, or perhaps a little stupidly, having initially been told that morning we hadn’t got a table and thinking our host at Auberge La Dauphine had booked us into another restaurant, we had not held back in our wine tasting. We merrily downed all our tasting samples in the afternoon’s three wineries we’d visited, which is probably not the best preparation for eating in one of the world’s best restaurants (although being the consummate eater, I dug deep and ploughed on).

I ordered the Luderitz oysters to awaken my palette and for a starter selected the beef, pork & wild mushroom porchetta, with saffron pickled cauliflower & sourdough toast. The porchetta was quite moist and although the taste of the meat wasn’t spectacular, it wasn’t bad at all. I really liked the pickled cauliflower, though, which both looked and tasted great. The Fritto Misto (lightly battered veg & anchovies) on the other side of the table were a light and tasty appetiser.

Despite most of the eight mains on offer not being the most adventurous, they all contained little twists that piqued my interest, such as the Calf’s liver with merlot vinegar & the wild mushroom pasta with smoked vinegar. I went for the most intriguing combination, if a little odd sounding, rack of whey fed pork, vanilla mash, fennel, pickled peach & crackling. I definitely think crackling should be a more regular accompaniment with pork dishes and do find it a little sad that it’s so rarely offered.

I was quite unsure of how the vanilla would go with the potato, let alone the rest of the dish, but was actually amazed when I took my first mouthful of all the ingredients. The vanilla seemed to very slightly take the edge off the pickled peach & fennel, without diminishing the enhancing quality of those two flavours with the pork. It tasted like a dish from a great restaurant should, bringing unexpected ingredients together in a new and better way. The crackling was light, crunchy and noisy to eat, but I was oblivious to this, in my slightly inebriated, food dreamworld.  Ms R’s crisp skinned yellowtail tuna was good, but nothing compared to the pork.

Desserts were a must, after my amazing main course, and there were actually several of the options I quite fancied. The bitter chocolate slab with grapefruit & earl grey ice cream lost out in the end to the Granny Smith fritters with buttermilk & ginger sherbet, with the white chocolate fondant with granadilla ice cream chosen by Ms R. Out of the two desserts, I much preferred the fritters and really liked the zinginess of the ginger sherbet with the apples, with the buttermilk component adding a complimentary creaminess to the dish.

Le Quartier Francais surpassed my expectations and considering they were pretty high to begin with, that was no mean feat. The food was superb, the menu different & interesting, the service excellent and the value fantastic (£50 in total, for 3 courses each, plus a bottle of the very good, local, Graham Beck bubbly and a glass of port with dessert). You would think it couldn’t get any better than that, but my night was capped off when a quartet of complaining French customers were swiftly shown the door when they demanded to be seated in the restaurant & not the bistro. C’est magnifique!