Rust en Vrede
ricing is a relatively simple thing – most of the time. Calculate your input costs, add an industry- acceptable margin and that’s your price. It gets more complicated when you’re operating in the luxury goods and services market, though. The prices in this space have much less to do with input costing and much more to do with “how much will consumers be prepared to pay for a product or an experience we will market as being exceptional, exclusive and the obvious choice for the discerning few?”
Rust en Vrede owner Jean Engelbrecht and chef David Higgs (previously of Meerendal’s Wheatfields restaurant) made a brave decision to set the bar very high when they entered this space with the Rust en Vrede restaurant late in 2007. The absolute minimum a diner will pay for a single meal here is R400. That’s without bottled water, without wine, without coffee, without a tip. Our bill, for two people, was R1 570.00 – before gratuity. We had two glasses of Jose Dhondt Champagne as an aperitif; one four-course meal (R400) with a glass of South Hill Sauvignon Blanc and a glass of Rust en Vrede Estate; and the six-course food-and-wine pairing (R800).
It might be the most I’ve ever paid for a South African meal, but Rust en Vrede is not alone in this space. Bosman’s at the Grande Roche in Paarl offers a 12-course dégustation menu with wine for R1 200pp; Margot Janse’s eight-course gourmand menu with wine at The Tasting Room at Le Quartier Français in Franschhoek costs R840; Luke Dale-Roberts gets a lot of takers for his R700 seven-course food-and-wine-pairing menu at La Colombe; and Auberge Michel in Gauteng charges R410 for a seven-course dinner without wine. Rust en Vrede is different in that there is no à la carte option; no way of having a starter and a main, or a main and a dessert with a glass or two of wine and paying about R250. No tyranny of choice here – the only options are the four-course for R400; the six-course for R550; or the six-course food-and-wine pairing for R800.
It’s almost moot to ask whether there’s a consumer base for this kind of offering. If you structure, price, deliver and market a product or a service correctly, there’s a consumer base for just about anything. And early indications are that the product has been eagerly pounced on. It was almost completely sold out during the opening summer season, and the restaurant was full the night we visited in early May. But there is still the notoriously difficult Cape winter season to get through and there must be concern about whether initial enthusiasm will be sustained once the novelty factor has worn off. It’s easier to seduce people to try something very different once than it is, at these prices, to get them back as regulars and, perhaps, to give them a sufficiently fabulous experience that they become ambassadors for the brand.
If this restaurant is going to be an ongoing success, it’ll be because the local community – the people of Stellenbosch and Somerset West – provide the bedrock of support to which free-spending summer tourists are added as a bonus. I suspect Higgs and Engelbrecht looked at the local market and thought: “There’s more than enough money here to pay our prices, but they’re not, generally speaking, an adventurous foodie lot, so let’s keep our menu quite conservative. We’ll make it sophisticated, yes, but not too unfamiliar.”
We had a very good meal with none of the 10 dishes we tasted from the two menus disappointing. My tastes incline more to the adventurous, so I doubt whether the scallop and king prawn with Napoli chorizo and sauce vierge, tasty though it was, will linger in my memory as long as the geranium and honeybush poached foie gras with samp and marogo that Margot Janse served me in August last year, or Luke Dale-Roberts’s poached oyster with watercress cream and osetra caviar. I was also a little surprised at how many dishes had fruit in the ingredient mix – there was fig, and pear, and apple, and plum, all adding a retro edge (and perhaps a nostalgic memory of childhood home-cooked meals) to the otherwise contemporary menu. But I am confident that the style of cuisine that Higgs is offering is pitched exactly right to ensure maximum acceptance in his target market.
Sommelier Neil Grant has been very clever in compiling the excellent winelist. There must have been a temptation to structure wine pricing along the same lines as the food. And, yes, diners can pay a lot of money for wine – like R1 600 for a 2001 Ernie Els – but they don’t have to. The Guardian Peak range is available at close to cellar-door prices; there are very drinkable wines by the glass at very competitive prices; and there is a good selection of white wines at under R100 a bottle and red wines at just over R100. There is also a worthwhile selection of international wines – most from France and the Antipodes – at prices not much more than retail.
I did feel slightly cheated, though, by the choices for the food and wine pairing. The matches were spot on, but they were almost all with wines from the lower price echelons of the list. With all the dishes, there were other wines on the list that would have matched the food as neatly, but would have given extra zing in the glass. It was the only time during the evening that I felt budgetary considerations had played a role.
What Rust en Vrede does really, really well is provide a sense of occasion. Their location helps. It’s very difficult not to have a positive sense of expectation as you wind your way up the mountainside through the pictureperfect vineyards of other farms before, right at the top, you drive through the elegant and historic gates of your destination. Before you reach the restaurant door, a hostess has come to meet-and-greet you and take you through to the terrace for a pre-dinner drink.
The restaurant is located in a restored barrel cellar and has been decorated with an unobtrusive sense of expensive taste which is modern and still pays homage to the history of the space, which dates back to 1783. The tables are large and set far enough apart to allow intimacy; the chairs are comfortable; the table linen is crisply white; and the cutlery and crockery obviously well-chosen – all the wine glasses are from the Riedel Sommelier range. Chef Higgs presides over an energetic brigade in a gleaming high-tech kitchen which is part of the dining space. This is Style with a capital “S”.
The waiters are young and good looking and enthusiastic. And they offer extra little flourishes that very few other restaurants locally do – for example, when they pour water, they hold a napkin between the pour and the diner to obviate any splashing. They’re not perfect – as is too often the case in South Africa, their knowledge of the product isn’t detailed enough – but they are very good. When diners leave, they are presented with a giftwrapped mini-baguette to have with breakfast the next morning.
The whole experience is designed to make the diner feel like a special person in a special place, and that, more than the quality of the food or the breadth and intrigue of the winelist, is the key factor in ensuring the sustained success of Rust en Vrede. If they maintain or even refine and improve that sense of occasion, then the price tag won’t frighten off too many visitors. If they let that sense of occasion slip, then the bill will be scrutinised more closely, and more disbelievingly, and the cost of the evening will start to matter in a way it doesn’t now.
John Maytham is the host of the afternoon
drive show on 567 CapeTalk. Though
he’s never been formally trained in the
kitchen, he’s been writing about food for
25 years; and if restaurant meals consumed
counted academically, he’d have a PhD.
Address: Annandale Road
Helderberg, Stellenbosch
Tel: (02)881-3881
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Email: dining@rustenvrede.com
