Category: this is south africa

Patina

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Boys Dinner with the MBCC last night and we headed out for steak.

Steak, as discussed with the Tall Accountant en route, is one of those things that’s  easy to do well (no pun intended), but for precisely that reason, is difficult to excel at. There are lots of very good steak places, but there are very few excellent steak places, because cook it right and it’s about as good as it can get.

Or so we thought.

Patina had been recommended to us by several friends. And all of them said that it was an excellent steak place. The expectations bar had been set high, and we went in ready to be wowed or  disappointed.

It was a wow.

I’ve eaten a lot of steak in my life. Add the other 175+ years (eina) of experience around the table and you have a veritable panel of steak expertise. And yet it was widely agreed that this was the best that any of us have ever tasted.

That’s not to say that previous excellent steak places haven’t also been excellent. Barristers remains a favourite – I’ve never had a bad steak there in my n (or more) visits. But this was something else. I enjoyed a 300g fillet with chunky chips (others raved about the risotto) and a blue cheese sauce, A couple of sides of onion rings completed the main course picture and I banged in a stonking Affogato for good measure.

The food was amazing, the wine was great, they have Stella Artois on tap and the service (Wilfred from Malawi – “He’s a Lilongwe from home”) was perfect.

It’s not cheap, mind. And if you’re going to charge those sort of prices, you need to back it up with a very special experience. Patina did that and more. Quite incredible, and now my new go-to steak house.

This was not a paid review. I had a good night and I think you deserve one too. You should go here.

Patina
35 Dean St, Newlands, Cape Town
021 823 9739

Two panos

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I’m not a huge fan of panorama photos.
Well, I like the idea, but all too often, the actual product never really matches up to what I was hoping for (or even expecting).

Unless you’re going to plan ahead and take your own individual photos and stitch them in lightroom, it’s not going to be a great result.
That said, if you’re willing to acknowledge that you are using a mobile phone and not a DSLR, then your pano app can be fun for sharing a scene on whatsapp (or… er… a blog).

I popped the Mavic up above the early morning mist at home this morning and got this. It’s 21 images stitched together by the DJI software, but then you only get a 0.6MB image.
Still, what a shot (though I say it myself)…

One of those occasions where you really wonder if anyone would notice if you sent it up another 80m.

I didn’t. Obviously.

And then this, from Camps Bay this lunchtime. We had a spare half hour and so we grabbed a quick ice cream and a walk on the beach.

Full size here (10928 x 3520 nogal).

We’d forgotten how amazing Camps Bay can be out of season.
It was nice to be reminded.

 

UPDATE: I went back the next day and took a real panorama. You… well, you can see the difference. 🙂

Skeleton Gorge Fire News

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If you live in or around the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town, you’ll likely have seen or heard the fire helicopters doing their work on a fire in Skeleton Gorge yesterday afternoon and again this morning.

I don’t have any statistics to hand, but many of the wildfires in the Cape Town area are caused by humans: either maliciously (arson) or accidentally (carelessly discarded cigarette butts, glass bottles etc). As this fire was in an area which is frequented by hikers, I was guess that this one was going to be one of these accidental ignitions.

But no.

Enviro fire investigators were tasked by the Table Mountain National Park to investigate the origin and cause of the fire that started around 15h00 in the Skeleton Gorge area. We can confirm on behalf of SANParks that the cause of this fire was as a result of a massive rock fall that caused huge amounts of heat and sparks to be generated when the falling boulders struck other rocks, setting the grass and leaves alight which then quickly spread up the steep slope. 

Wow. Nature is out to kill us, even when we’re not out trying to kill Nature.

I find it incredible that heat and sparks from a rockfall could trigger a wildfire, but if it could happen (which it clearly can) then bone-dry Cape Town is the perfect candidate for it right now.

As proven yesterday.

Late crossword

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I’m going to be in trouble.
This was supposed to be posted over the weekend, but I did other stuff instead.

Here’s a summary of the exciting stuff that I did instead:

Some taxidermy.
Some standing in the South Atlantic Ocean at 9 o’clock at night.

Please click those links. I need the traffic.
The weekend was great fun, but it wasn’t posting this month’s crossword.

[crossword]

(here’s the link if you can’t see that crossword puzzle above).

Good luck. Even I managed to do ok on this one. 🙂

Maybe no-one will notice that it’s a couple of days late.

Expedition with Experimentation

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Some time ago, I said that I would get around to doing some steel wool (wire wool) shots.

Ja. It was 2012. So what? I still did some.

Eventually.

8:30pm on a quiet April night in Suiderstrand. Not much wind, low tide, warm. Time for an expedition with the kids. A quick glance at a couple of posts on the internet to decide on the best settings for this experiment, and off we trot.

An hour later, tired, a bit chilly (one of us fell in the sea) (it was me), we returned. With these.

You need to see it on black though. The reflections made these shots a whole lot more dramatic than they would have been, but I was surprised at just how easy it was to shoot them.

The kids had a great time, helping out with focussing and lighting, looking after the equipment while dad waded out into the shallows and whirled his thingy around. (Careful now.)

I would highly recommend wire wool ‘togging for keeping the kids interested and engaged, and for pretty easy, but effective shots. We might try some more advanced stuff like silhouettes and the like next time.
But for now, I’m pretty happy that just 5½ years after I said I’d do this, I did it.