Eat Their Greens

Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2006

The woody vegetation that blankets the mountains and coastal slopes of the Western Cape of South Africa is known as fynbos — Afrikaans for "fine bush." The plants make up a good part of the Cape floral kingdom: the smallest, but richest by area, of the world's six floral kingdoms. Thanks

to the incredible variety of fynbos, the Western Cape region is almost as botanically diverse as the entire northern hemisphere.

Since early 2005, Roberto de Carvalho, executive chef at Azure, a restaurant in Cape Town's Twelve Apostles Hotel and Spa, has used fynbos leaves and stems in place of regular herbs and spices in some of his favorite dishes. "You're eating something that you can only eat here," says De Carvalho, who collects the fynbos in the hills around the hotel every morning. "It's something different."

A recent meal from the fynbos menu started with a small sampling of pâté made from snoek, a wonderfully oily fish caught in the cold waters off Cape Town. Starters include ostrich rolled in wild rosemary and drizzled with grapeseed oil from the wine district east of Cape Town, and crayfish bisque with wild fennel. Mains include loin of springbok wrapped in marogo, a type of leafy vegetable, and cured bacon. There's also kingklip, an eel-like fish served with wild garlic and vegetable sosaties, a sweetly marinated kebab popular in South Africa. My favorite use for fynbos, though, was in the dessert: ice cream flavored with rooibos, South Africa's indigenous tea. Dribbled with a rich, velvety fynbos honey, the ice cream was the perfect end to an unusual meal. www.12apostleshotel.com