Category Archives: International braais
Expedition to London gathers steam
Jan Braai (to quote Jan Braai) are very much excited. Rarely seen beyond the braai smoke of Stellenbosch, Jan is boarding a flight to London on Friday night, with me as his tong-wielding (buffalo) wing man, to spread the gospel of the braai to that great South African city in the north. A week of meat on fires awaits, with a couple of celebrity braais – Schalk Brits, Ernst Joubert, Justin Melck and the Saracens rugby team, and Luke Watson, Pieter Dixon, Michael Claasens and their Bath team-mates, amongst others – on the London agenda; and then there’s the visit to Shaka Zulu…
Jan and Dan. Spreading the braaiday message from the Southern tip of Africa all the way to London
The sheer number of South Africans in London (Afrikaans is the third most spoken language in the city, apparently, after Urdu and Polish…) makes for an array of South African stores; it also makes for myriad South African restaurants, of which Shaka Zulu is the latest. A vast, upmarket venue that’s restaurant, bar, club and temple to South African indulgence rolled into one, it’s exactly the sort of place King Shaka would have approved of had he pitched up in London in 2010. Which is just as well, ‘cos that’s where we’re headed this Saturday.
Shaka Zulu will be firing up the braais from mid-morning, and by the time 12 o’clock comes round, the doors will be open, meat will be cooking, and the beer will be particularly cold. All that’s needed, then, is a horde of hungry, thirsty South Africans, looking to celebrate our London warm-up for National Braai Day, and watch the Springboks thump the Wallabies in the Tri-Nations later in the day on Shaka Zulu’s big screens. A mere £20 gets you the braai buffet (the sight of the menu reduced Jan to tears), the beer will be particularly inexpensive, and the gees proudly South African all day. It’s no wonder that Jan Braai are very much excited.
- When: Saturday 4 September
- Time: 12pm (Springbok victory begins at 4pm)
- Where: Shaka Zulu, Chalk Farm Road, Camden
- Cost: £20 for braai buffet (boerewors & chutney, chicken sosaties, lamb chops, rump steak with beer braaivleis basting sauce, hot cheese & potato salad, green leaf salad & mustard dressing, grilled corn, koeksisters)
- Google map directions: click here
- Tube station: Camden
American invasion?
Alright, so he still occasionally calls it a ‘barbecue’, and at heart he’d take Notre Dame’s ‘Fighting Irish’ college football team over his adopted Western Province. But for an American import, he’s taken to his new home impressively: Douglas Oberwortmann speaks reasonable Afrikaans, can explain the basics of the LBW law, and most importantly, is a genius with a braai.
The owner of Cape Town’s iconic Hemisphere night club has a passion for South Africa’s seminal activity, and on the evening he unleashed the tongs with the Braai4Heritage team, he showed a touch of McGyver: armed with tomato sauce, two old bottles of peri peri, some mustard, and plenty of Castle, Doug conjured up an exquisite marinade, tossed in some rump, and ten minutes later was dishing out strips of perfect steak.
So, an American educated in South African culture – there’s hope for the United States yet. And Doug will be manning his braai through the World Cup (“I’m backing Bafana and the States for the final,” he reveals), and on to National Heritage Day on September 24. But will be be braaiing in his nightclub, 31 floors up in the heart of Cape Town, on the big day? “The fire inspectors would have heart failure, but you never know…”.
The South American braai
Chile's champion braai master
While Jan Braai continues to career round Europe setting fire to public spaces and spreading the gospel of Chisa Nyama, I’m back in South Africa, armed with photographs from a recent trip to South America, the land of football, beautiful women, and the largest steaks on earth. Not even the most carniverous corners of the Free State produce steaks like these – La Cabrera, one of the finest steak houses in Buenos Aires, offers a ‘baby steak’ at 400 grams, a ‘regular’ at 800 grams, and onwards and upwards from there…
Unsurprisingly, then, it’s a part of the world where the braai feels quite at home, and while they do curse that most noble of culinary arts with the heretical term ‘barbecue’ (verbal kryptonite to Jan Braai), they are a handy lot around the fire. The man in the picture in particular.
He’s not from Argentina, however; instead, Felipe Ignacio Fernandez Gonzalez resides in Santiago, the sprawling capital of Chile that lies beneath the Andes. But the Chileans are just as proud of their meat as their Argentinean neighbours, and like South Africans, they take cooking it extremely seriously. Translation: they make an awful lot of food.
Small Chilean steaks...
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