loveFOOD meets… Margot Janse
Twice crowned South African chef of the year, Margot Janse runs one of the country’s most prestigious restaurants but hasn't forgotten those less fortunate around her.
I met Margot Janse on the sun-soaked terrace adjoining her restaurant, The Tasting Room at boutique hotel Le Quartier Français, when I was in the Western Cape exploring the fruit and wine industry there. Dutch-born Margot arrived in South Africa when she was barely 20 years old, after being advised to "go and see the world first" by the drama schools she applied to back home. “I thought at the time, ‘Screw you – I will go and explore the world then!’ And that was that,” says Margot.
“I always loved restaurants and cooking and all that magic,” she says. “So I got a job at the age of 23 at a restaurant in Johannesburg, and learnt how to cook in a kitchen instead of going through a professional course.”
Margot’s apprenticeship was at a restaurant called Ciro at The Ritz. “It was such a positive environment there,” she reflects. “No-one ever said to me, ‘this must always be on the right-hand side’, or ‘you can only ever do this with fish’. I was never taught the rules of boxed-in cooking, so I was allowed to play. I would stay between lunch and dinner and create whatever I wanted.”
'We love vegetarians!'
Despite having no formal training, Margot has twice won South Africa's prestigious Eat Out Chef of the Year award, and The Tasting Room (one of four restaurants at Le Quartier Français) is regularly included in the list of top 10 South African restaurants. The food is fine dining, the atmosphere relaxed, and only ‘surprise’ tasting menus are served. It would be against the rules for me to reveal the menu here, but I can tell you that is involves eight courses, indigenous ingredients, and a lot of wine.
Unusually for a chef, Margot heartily welcomes diners with dietetic needs and preferences. “We love pescetarians and vegetarians – they’re the easiest to cook for!” says Margot. “Not understanding someone’s eating principles is just ignorance. People must do what is right for them. Who am I to judge someone about not wanting to eat meat? And if you are gluten intolerant, then who am I to judge that?” Margot has even been known to accommodate diners who can’t deal with ‘visible onions’ on their plate – “although that’s a bit trickier,” she says.
Muffin Friday
But The Tasting Room is far more than fancy food, fussy diners and luxurious on-site accommodation. It’s based in Franschhoek, a town which, despite being slap-bang in the middle of South Africa’s beautiful wine heartland, is not without its problems.
“There’s a lot of hunger here,” says Margot. “It’s all very well talking about how fabulous my beef is, or how free range our ingredients are, but around the corner is hunger and we have to address that.”
Margot set up a project in 2008 to feed malnourished children living in Franschhoek, with help from current Eat Out Chef of the Year David Higgs, owner of Five Hundred at The Saxon restaurant in Johannesburg. ‘Muffin Friday’, which still exists today, involves cooking nutritious muffins every Friday for children at a local crèche. The muffin contains the daily nutritional requirements for a four-year-old, and uses ingredients such as linseed, banana and carrots. The scheme was so successful that, in association with not-for-profit organisation Kusasa, it extended in 2011 to include a morning bowl of porridge on weekdays for over 1,000 local school children.
Noisy peas
The importance of good food to a child’s health hit home when Margot had children of her own. She explains: “I have a son who’s nine and when he arrived that’s when I really started to think, ‘what shall I feed my child?’ I realised how privileged my son is. He goes to school with breakfast in his body and a lovely lunch box. You can’t learn if you’re hungry – some of the local children we feed didn’t get supper last night, or breakfast in the morning.”
Margot has some top tips for getting kids to eat their greens. “Don’t hide your vegetables – make them exciting, and then your children will eat them. The best way to make vegetables exciting is by sounding excited about them. Give them a cool name – I used to call sugar snap peas ‘noisy peas’ in front of my son, because of the way they ‘pop’. He still calls them that.”
The problem with motherhood
After an hour’s chat, the inevitable ‘what’s it like to be a female chef?’ question reared its head. “That must be the question I get asked the most,” says Margot. “Do I have boobs? Yes. Does it make a difference? I don’t know. For me it’s tough because I have a child. I’m a mother, which is a different role to a father. I think [motherhood] has a lot to do with why there aren’t that many women chefs out there.”
“But I can’t just abandon my kitchen team whenever I feel like it. What kind of example is that to set? So instead I’ve made my child very much part of my life. He walks around the restaurant, we live nearby so I can be home and eating dinner with him in two minutes. I’m lucky in that respect.”
At one point about 10 years ago, Margot’s kitchen comprised solely female chefs: “an angle which we liked a lot!” she says. “But then I needed a sous chef and this fabulous guy applied, and I couldn’t say to him, ‘I’m sorry, you’ve got a penis’. In actual fact, I think it’s great to have a gender balance in a kitchen. At present we have a few more females than males in the kitchen, and it’s working nicely.”
As for Margot’s managing style, her ethos is “don’t be an arsehole, but do be honest. And have fun.” Margot makes sure her staff (pictured above) know what is expected from them, and in return she gives them her complete respect.
“I really try not to shout and scream,” says Margot. “I have way too much respect for my team to do that.”
To find out more about Margot, or to book a table at The Tasting Room on your next visit to South Africa, visit lqf.co.za.
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