#blahvsfood goes to Fyn in Cape Town

April 05, 2022

#blahvsfood goes to Fyn in Cape Town

(Number 92 on San Pellegrino’s Top 100 restaurants in the world)

I went and ate at Fyn, ranked the third best restaurant in all of Africa, and came away more impressed by what they have the potential to be than what they currently are.

The place is stunning and the food is a sexier, more contemporary take on Japanese Kaiseki cuisine with Nikkei influences and a large smattering of African ingredients and produce. It ticks every box of excellence. Great technique. Flavours that either amped up the umami or were clean and subtle. It was wonderful to eat Japanese food of this quality outside Japan.

Gamefish sashimi, blue prawn, daikon, tobiko

However I couldn’t help but think of the difference between an excellent restaurant and a truly great restaurant. An excellent restaurant ensures that every dish is conceived and executed to perfection, that there are no false notes, there is no dissonance in the sensory experience. And by those criteria, Fyn is faultless.

But the way food is going, greatness requires something more. It needs to be a fully committed articulation of the chef’s vision. That could be in terms of roots and geography, or a creative belief and idea, a technical or stylistic philosophy, a value system. And that vision needs to be translated cohesively in terms of ideas and execution to the dishes on your plate. That’s where Fyn falls just short and where its biggest opportunities lie.

Springbok steak in a Panko crust

The most interesting things about the menu were the dishes that truly and unabashedly leant into Fyn’s African heritage. I love that the steak used Springbok, with the gamey meatiness of the protein really brought out by the umami and depth of the sauce. There is an option to replace it with wagyu for a supplementary charge but I would remove the option because that just makes it a generic Japanese dish.

Local soft cheese, fried cricket

Similarly, instead of the traditional sorbet course, there was a tiny spoonful of a soft, creamy local cheese with a crispy fried cricket. It was less than a mouthful, but that tiny spoon showed greater imagination in how how we see and can reinterpret local proteins, sustainability and tradition than the rest of the menu put together.

I feel it’s an incredible achievement to be ranked one of the hundred best restaurants in the world. But unlike restaurants that are wedded to classical tradition, Fyn is a restaurant that has the potential to do more and to be more. I would love to see it dive fearlessly into its potential and become the greatest restaurant to have ever emerged from the continent of Africa. To achieve that, it needs to celebrate Africa in some way in every single dish that they create.

I ate: