Last week I shot in Chef PJ Vadas’s kitchen for the second time, and I was struck again by what a cool chef he is. I was there to work. He was already working there. Yet we struck up a conversation about food and the hospitality game, and how season affects Winelands restaurants, and we almost forgot to do any work at all. PJ is easy like that. He loves food in all it’s forms and is curious about it and people who work with it – even photographers.

And it is PJ, he doesn’t allow anyone to call him Chef – finds it too stuffy. This doesn’t mean his kitchen is a riot either. On the contrary, it’s a well-oiled machine where everyone just gets on with what they have to do. No shouting, no histrionics. If you consider that PJ spent a significant amount of time working with Gordon Fucking Ramsay, you’d expect his kitchen to be a bit of a ‘yelly’, ‘sweary’ one, but it’s a calm place with a decidedly chilled atmosphere. All the elves of kitchenland are totally focused on their work, but they do it with a smile and a joke. When they got a walk-in for lunch while I was shooting, the volume didn’t go up, it actually went down. Everyone just got down to what they had to do and started sending out dishes.

Everyone has their role, taking responsibility for a particular dish or course. The degree of skill and technique is a major element in the cuisine of Camphors, and so is presentation. Nothing is simply tossed here. You find chefs staring intently at a plate just inches from their eyes as they carefully place a sliver of radish or an almond blossom from the tree outside. Everything is precise, and checked against PJ’s mental list of aesthetic appeal, ethics and sustainability, but most of all that of sensory pleasure. The dishes are creations that deliver on taste, but cleverly conceal impish nuances in texture and variations from traditional practices.

This intensity is carried through to the sourcing of ingredients and selection of suppliers too. While I was shooting – well, chatting really – the pork supplier, Phillip, arrived to drop off a fresh porker and some charcuterie his wife had made. PJ was straight out to greet him and have a look over the new arrival. While they inspected the traditionally farmed pig, he fired questions about weight, grading, feeding and so forth. When Phillip handed over a little joint of cured meat, PJ’s eyes lit up and he couldn’t wait to say his goodbyes so he could get at it with a little paring knife.

A delightful air-cured culatello is currently the featured charcuterie at Camphors and PJ is experimenting both with ways to use that and with new candidates to feature. My conversation with him obviously turned to the matter of cured meats and he was very happy to share Phillip’s contact details for fresh pork and those of his wife Michelle as a source of excellent cured cuts.

Something that I found a little disappointing while I was making images with the team, was that customers were not beating down the doors demanding food. Perhaps Vergelegen is a little out of the way for a Winter lunch, but people should flock when it is of this quality. The property is magnificent, there are plenty of things to engage even the fussiest visitor, and you get to sit down in a spectacular restaurant and eat PJ’s food. Of course, I’d rather be in the kitchen chatting with the chef, but lunch in the restaurant would be a fairly close second – especially if I could eat that Springbok fillet again.

This is another blog centred around the theme of just how much I love what I do. We might pretend that it’s actually about the craft and the images, but it’s really just to boast about how cool my job is.I have been supplying content for a restaurant website and working my way through the best and bravest of the establishments of the Western Cape. In the mix – buried on my list of 14 places to document – was a restaurant called Eight on Spier Wine Estate. I honestly have never given Spier much thought, having assumed that it was a bit of a tourist trap, and not necessarily a place to go searching for a ground-breaking restaurant or culinary innovation. Ha!

Eight is a complete revelation. If you sat a panel of contemporary food and trend analysts in a room and asked them to dream up the perfect farm restaurant, Eight would be the result. That might seem like hyperbole, but the days of slapping an “organic” label on everything and writing “grain-fed beef” on your menu – as if that was a good thing – are long gone. The world is moving to a new place in it’s requirement from restaurants. We want to know where our food comes from, who grew it, whether it is local, is it seasonal, have the proprietors treated the environment and our produce with respect before offering it to us for lunch? Eight ticks those boxes and keeps doing so until the pen runs out of ink.

The proprietors treat the environment and the produce well because they live there. The restaurant is an expression of their attitude towards farming sensibly, sustainably and seasonally. What they don’t grow or raise themselves, they source locally, from other responsible producers. Everything is measured against what is good for the earth and what is good to eat, both from a health and a taste perspective.

I photographed – then ate – a delicious burger made from beef pasture-reared by Angus McIntosh, the farmer, on the property. The depth of thinking that went into that burger was amazing. Instead of just taking some topside and mincing it then using the mince to make burgers, they mince all the meat of one animal. This means the burger flavour is the aggregate of a whole cow – keeps it juicy too. I even cut a wedge out of the burger to check that it was consistently cooked and juicy throughout. It was. The garnish came from the garden, the cheese from a nearby farm, just forgot to ask about the bun.

While we were fiddling around in burger land and realising just what a burger could be with the right attitude and ingredients, the farmer arrived to deliver eggs. His are eggs that have been forgotten by almost everyone in our modern, commodity-based food economy. Odd sizes and shapes, thick, hard shells, and delicious beyond all meaning. They come from hens that run around and scratch and lead proper chicken lives, and the proof is in the product. Ironically, Angus has trouble selling the ones that are too strangely shaped – people are so used to the uniformity of bland battery eggs, the they get all suspicious when they see a proper one. It may be a cliché to say the eggs come from happy chickens, but their richness and flavour is far from the cliché.

…which brings us to chickens. As you would expect if you’ve read this far, the chickens served at Eight are more than just free-range. For lack of a better description, pasture-reared or naturally raised might do. We had a spatch-cocked baby chicken for the shoot, and these little guys come from another local farmer who specialises in their production. Another surprisingly delicious event. I mean, who orders chicken in a restaurant? But if it’s this one, I’ll put my hand up for yard-bird next time.

Every day, the guy in charge of the gardens picks a bunch of what’s ripe or ready and delivers it to the kitchen at Eight. From this, the menu is decided and written up on chalkboards. I have a fondness for chalkboard restaurants anyway, as it typically means the menu is fluid. A seasonal ingredient, or some new produce might take the chef’s fancy and bring some new delight to the table. The quintessence of this is expressed in the simple but quite awesome garden salad. It’s made up of whatever’s in the garden, from leafy greens to edible flowers. Ours came with a bunch of leafy stuff, as winter is lettuce season ironically, and some snap peas, but the crowning glory was the flowers. There were nasturtium flowers, red pineapple sage blossoms, corn flowers and some pea shoots. Awesome.

It would be tempting to sit here and state that this is how all restaurants should be. And perhaps there’s a case to be made, but that would be forgetting the fact that restaurants have to operate in sterile cities, and can’t all be on farms. Thing is though, if you are in the Western Cape, and farms such as Spier are literally on your doorstep, why wouldn’t you go and experience this take on life. Perhaps it is more reasonable to suggest that all restaurants on farms should be more like Eight and feed people from the bounty they produce. Makes sense, especially since this is the way some of the top restaurants in the world are heading. I’m certainly convinced, and quite smug in the thought that visiting places like this is how I make my living.

If all my work involved was shooting plates of food, mine would be a very dull career. It’s the act of putting a face on the food I document that engages me thoroughly. The depth of my interest in food is also about my fascination with the people who grow, cook and eat it. So I spend a lot of time shooting candid portraits. It’s almost impossible to capture a flattering image of someone taking a mouthful of food, but I love the image above which I originally shot on film years ago.

It helped that the model loved the pasta dish she was given to eat, and that she was a complete sport. Chefs on the other hand are uniformly impossible to shoot easily, and usually difficult to capture well. This is where it helps to be able to engage them in a conversation about some aspect of food or hospitality so they almost forget you are there while they chat. A remote shutter-release cable and a tripod are also vital to this process. I try to get the chef to do something with their hands while we are having a conversation so that I can produce candid studies that are more than just your average mugshot.

It also helps to be a bit inventive. The image of Bertus Basson (above top right) was shot from a standing position on the counter where he was preparing vegetables. Of course I promised to clean it down thoroughly afterwards, and the session produced some of my favourite chef portraits. I also love the image I shot of Reuben taking a break from a heavy morning for a quick espresso before getting into a busy lunch service.

It is also helpful to carry a little situational awareness and a knowledge of kitchen practices with you. If the kitchen team address their leader as Chef, it’s respectful of his or her domain to do so to. Kitchens are busy, frantic, often brutal places to work in, so treading lightly and respectfully s always a good idea.  Finding someone on their break outside of, the hectic kitchen environment is also a good idea sometimes. It can produce moments of levity in the tight, controlled severity of a fine-dining kitchen – or any kitchen for that matter.

Capturing people actually eating might be dodgy, but getting diners to do something ‘foodie’ with their hands is always a better idea than having them stare at their food with their hands in their laps. Waiting for the moment is as important in food photography as in wildlife photography, you can just use your knowledge of the subject to manage your subject a little more effectively.

And the best is to catch someone completely unawares as they are tucking into something yummy. It’s all in the timing – as the fork is lifted to the mouth, but before the mouth is actually open to receive the payload, or as the payload has been delivered and just before the first bite. Delicate balance and demanding of special patience and a carefully cultured cloak of invisibility – the ability to sit very still and almost ‘disappear’ as you wait for the telling moment, then a sudden motion to attract the eyes, get attention but not bring on staring. It’s all in the hips – or the finger on the remote shutter release.

 

After a recent working trip in Germany, I got a chance to visit my brother-in-law who was working in Norway. He was the chef/manager at a salmon fishing lodge in Western Norway near a little village called Eikefjord. It’s a startlingly beautiful place with a restored wooden farmhouse over two hundred years old, and seeing as I happened to have my cameras with me, I couldn’t help but document what was happening there.

This story appeals to my obsession with understanding the source of the food we eat. The family that owns the farm have spent years, and considerable expense, rehabilitating the wild salmon in the beautiful river that runs through it. Historic over-fishing of the rivers of Western Norway, and now the ogre of fish farming in the fjords, have devastated these rivers and their native fish. The wild salmon that remain are threatened by escapees from the farms swimming up the nearest river, making friends, and muddying the genetic waters so to speak. The fugitives also pressurise food resources in the river and bring multiple diseases and parasites with them into the system.

The rehabilitation project involves a catch-and release programme for the wild fish. There are released into a holding tank to breed before being released into the river again. When the fry are big enough, they are scooped up in a trough by helicoper and ferried far out to sea, beyond the fjord, and released in the open ocean. This means that the fry (or fingerlings, more accurately) do not swim through waters polluted by the fish farms’ effluent and attendant parasites and predators. The Wildlings are given a chance, with the hope that they will one day return to their parent river to spawn. As the salmon of each river in Norway, and even in Scotland and elsewhere, are genetically distinct from each other, a simple test will establish if the fish are returning to the river of their birth.

As for the refugee farm fish in the river, the programme for them is catch-and-eat. Some scales are taken from them for genetic testing so fines can be handed out to the farms from which they flee, then they are either smoked or eaten fresh in the dining room of the lodge. There are also trout caught in the river and these are escapees from the new trout farms blossoming in the fjords. For them, it’s the same fate – lunch or dinner.

Like any good story, this one changed my life. Not in a huge way, but it stopped me eating farmed salmon. I am not against fish farming, but I object to sloppy practices in the industry. There’s a Cob farming operation in the Eastern Cape which operates in a closed system, so the fish and any pollutants can never find their way to the ocean. I’ll eat that Cob (or kabeljou) happily.

Another change was my desire to travel in the Scandinavian countries some more. Their culinary practices are experiencing a revolution at the moment and some of the top restaurants in the world are emerging there, with natural and foraged ingredients leading inspired menus. Another Autumn in the North is definitely on the cards for me.

One of the incredible things about what I do is the travel part. Like food, travel is a huge part of our modern lifestyles, so magazines and other media have a huge appetite for content that relates to both. For this reason, I get to do lots of travelling when my domestic work schedule allows. Thanks to photography, I have travelled all over the east, and fairly extensively in Europe, and the more I focus my niche into the food/travel content arena, the more opportunities present themselves.

A while back, I was sent to do a story on the Chobe river in Botswana. This was notable because of the incident that cast a bit of a shadow over the trip and taught me a valuable lesson. I was paired with a journalist from the magazine, and we flew from Cape Town to Johannesburg on an early flight to catch a connection to Zambia, before travelling by road to Botswana. On the flight the journo and I got to chatting about the industry and our travels. Of course I painted myself as the seasoned international traveler who’d been on assignment in Singapore, Thailand, Mozambique, China, Vietnam, Zambia, Hong Kong and more recently in the UK. So much had my fame spread, that I’d recently come off an assignment for BBC Olive where I’d contributed a story on Knysna to the travel section of that magazine. What a guy!

So we duly landed at OR Tambo airport and rushed to check in for our flight to Livingstone, Zambia. We handed in our passports, and the attendant looked over and asked where the other lady was. ?… In the early morning scramble to get ready and race to the airport, I’d grabbed my wife’s passport from the drawer. What a seasoned international traveler. What a prat!

The upshot was a night in Jozi for me while the journo went on with one of my back-up cameras. A courier and a sleepless night later, I joined her on the Zambezi Queen – a five star houseboat on the Chobe River – the next day. All the embarrassment settled, I got on and came back with some really wonderful images for the story. Needless to say, on more recent assignments in France, Germany and Norway, my passport has been the first thing I look for – before I even pack cameras.

Whenever people ask me which is my favourite restaurant in Cape Town, I get funny looks for the response. I think a restaurant is as good as the mood you’re in or the reason you visit it, just as much as the skill of the chef or the serving staff. There are a lot of restaurants on the peninsula I enjoy visiting, but my favourite place no matter what the occasion, is Olympia Café.

The thing about it, is its consistency. If you ate a seafood pasta there three years ago, and you order it today, it will be just as good. The place is casual and devil-may-care to an extent that some people find alarming, but I just love it. And the food is outrageously (and consistently) good.

Olympia centres around a bakery in Kalk Bay which is the next stop down the Peninsula after Muizenberg and St. James en route to Fish Hoek. Kalk Bay is a little slice of village life, with it’s quaint buildings and small, working fishing harbour. In Summer the place is packed with locals and foreign visitors alike, but by some miracle, the places that have popped up to cater to them remain pretty cool. Things are changing though. But Olympia remains a stalwart of localness. No bookings, no airs and graces, and definitely no bullshit. If you want to eat there, you have to write your name on the board and wait. Doesn’t matter if you’re the King of Denmark or the guy from the flat upstairs. Behave.

I’ve always wanted to shoot there. It’s got such warmth and character. The hard-pressed chefs who are just a blur during service, are such characters. I actually once spoke to the owner, Kenny, about shooting a book there, and doing the whole thing on a couple of vintage film cameras. Nothing came of it. So imagine my delight when I pitched Olympia to Pepper as a candidate for inclusion in their book Stars Shining on Cape Town and got a thumbs-up. I finally had a reason to take a camera to Olympia with me. As it happened, I only had two hours for the shoot, but could have spent two days there, such is the depth of character it exudes. Ah well, perhaps another opportunity will present itself…

Two years ago, my wife Camilla and I decided to stop dreaming and talking about opening a restaurant, and just did it. Our seminal Nike moment came after lunch with Bertus Basson. He leaned across the table when he’d finished eating the meal Camilla had cooked for us and said “You should open a restaurant.” Three days later we were negotiating with a farmer so we could use his old barn as a restaurant.

I feel you. You’re wondering what this has to do with food photography. Point is, I’ve said before that I am a food photographer because I love food first and photography second. Well, with that comes a love of feeding and entertaining people. So it sort of stands to reason that I would feel the irresistible lure of the restaurant industry. And I’m married to a chef. Did I ever stand a chance of not opening a restaurant?

During the course of my career both as a writer and a photographer, I’ve photographed or written about hundreds of restaurants. I’ve listened to chefs talk about how they organise a kitchen, how to design a menu, what customers like best. I’ve listened to managers rabbit on about seating plans and front-of-house skills, grumpy customers and happy regulars. Seemed like it was time to find out if I’d learned anything.

If nothing else, I thought, it would make a fantastic photographic studio. De Meye is a lovely old farm with all the oak trees and romance you could wish for. Having a restaurant in an old shed there made for a perfect place to shoot food. The props and tables required for styling were right there. There was a fully equipped kitchen in the next room. Opening the restaurant on weekends for business took care of the studio costs – what a win.

With my wife and her brother Jason taking care of the food, The Table quickly became much more than a photographic studio. It turned into a viable business which was named Country-style Restaurant of the Year by Eat Out Restaurant Guide in 2011. Back of the net! It had some unexpected consequences on my work too. I’ve always loved shooting in restaurants and getting to know chefs, pretending I actually fit in with the kitchen team. Suddenly, instead of pretending I knew anything about the game, I was starting to learn properly. I became one of the boys. When I was working in a kitchen with a chef and his team, we’d start talking shop, and I would get more and better access to candid images of the industry than ever before. Fantastic.

I think it also made me look at a plate of food differently. The idea of soil to fork was never lost on me. I love to document food production in all it’s forms, not just in the sculpting of a plate of food. But being in the game helped me look beyond even that to the people who served the food, the drizzle of olive oil that brought it alive, the importance of granny’s rolling pin in the shortness of the pastry. I found myself increasingly bringing this understanding into my images.

The Table was sold to new operators in May 2013, but a few months of free weekends have already got Camilla and I talking about another one. Some old hands in the industry are looking at us askance, wondering why we’d put ourselves through the set-up and establishment cycle again. We’ve learned some sharp lessons from the last one, and a photographer needs a studio after all, but most of all – we’ve been bitten. The bug, the rush, the joy of the hospitality game has got us, and we need to see what’s next.