Le Must, Upington, Northern Cape

We have travelled far already and have tried some fabulous wines, had some tongue-smacking meals and slept in some really magnificent surroundings.

To try to keep a little bit of order in our memories, we'll start back in Northern Cape, where we stopped in Upington after a veeery long and dry drive through the flat Kalahari Desert.



Upington does not have a lot to boast about, but one thing it does have is the best restaurant in the Northern Cape: Le Must Restaurant (www.lemustupington.com/restaurant.htm)... and it surely is so!! A must, pun intended :-)

They say it's a good idea to book ahead, which we did - and even though we arrived off-season, it WAS packed when we arrived. With good reason, we aggreed.

Slightly odd interior decoration with a tad too many mirrors did not spoil the best meal we had had so far in SA: to get us going while we waited for the waiter, we were given a stuffed bun containing something like onion and bacon. Quite good and very tasty, but we did miss the normal bread basket due to starvation!
Starters for him and her of ostrich and springbok carpaccio, respectively. Tender!! While the wine list was impressively long we chose Stellenzicht chardonnay 2003 to accompany us all through the dinner and this was quite a good match - we're not experts on tones yet, but a sweetness combined with esdragon and ...some glögg spices (not quite sure which, but possibly cloves). :-)

The main courses were: oxtail in a hearty redwine sauce with a serving of cooked, puffed maize, butternut mash and blanched spinach; and a ragout of lamb with cous-cous, raisins and veggies as above.
While the oxtail generally was really really tasty, the puffed maize was a bit ...odd, tasting like rice pudding, but salty. The lamb went down a treat :-) (and fast too - it had been a long day!).

Desserts for the needy: creme brulee, the never-disappointing, although hardly ever perfect after-dinner-treat. Too sweet, too hard, too soft, too cold, too warm, too burned ... but always edible :-)

And, off course - an espresso to keep the driver awake on the way home. Perfect and smooth.

All in all a good meal, and a really good surprise in the middle of what we thought was nowhere.

Initiation

We have faced it: we're both 'horrible' gourmets. We loooove good food and wine, and we love to spoil ourselves rotten when we have the chance (and the money). Ok - also sometimes when we don't have the money... We only live once and, as we just read on a pillar in the pub where we had lunch: Always yield to temptation- it may not come your way again!

On these pages we will endevour to describe our best experiences here in South Africa, to share and perhaps inspire and tempt you.