10:10 am All is calm on the wooden deck, the only sounds are the gurgling of a stream and the far-off ticking of a sprinkler on one of Chamonix Estate’s lawns. It’s not the first time Richard Carstens has been a chef here. In the early nineties, he managed and cooked at La Maison de Chamonix at the manor house. Now, he and his team occupy the 300-year-old blacksmith’s cottage that, until recently, housed Racine Restaurant.
10:15 am The chef and his seven-strong brigade are absorbed in their respective tasks. Commis chef Lynette Chikuwe is spooning wasabi mayonnaise into squeezy bottles and behind her chef de partie Mable Murambatsvina is portioning sourdough. Pastry chef Danielle van der Merwe is whipping Italian meringue destined for chocolate macarons.
10:36 am Richard emerges from the walk-in fridge carrying a metal tray of cured trout. He starts filleting the fish, then proceeds to scrape every last morsel of trout from the skin, which will be used for crackling. “Can you pin-bone these for me?” he asks, handing the portions to sous chef Marcu Janse van Rensburg. The fish is for one of today’s specials: baked trout Alaska with smoked salmon ice cream. “I first made it at Bijoux Restaurant in 2001,” says Richard. “You could say the Arkeste menu is an evolution of my food over the past 30 years. There’s still a Japanese influence, but I’ve pulled back a lot on the soy umami.”
This story is from the January - February 2020 edition of Woolworths TASTE.
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This story is from the January - February 2020 edition of Woolworths TASTE.
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