CELEBRATE VALENTINE'S AT HARTFORD HOUSE

Click above to enlarge your invitation...

"Spoil your loved one..."

Spoil your loved one with a delectable Valentine's Day dinner.
Enjoy a 5 course meal with a romantic flair.
Receive a complimentary glass of bubbly on arrival and enjoy the sultry sound of Jeff Judge's
saxophone playing live in the background.

Date : 14 February 2012

Venue : Hartford House

Time : 19h00 for 19h30

Cost : R395 per person

RSVP : Emma
reception@hartford.co.za
033 263 2713

Contact us today
to make your reservation.

For more information please visit :
www.hartford.co.za

SOUTH AFRICA'S TOP RESTAURANT : AS BIG AS IT GETS

Pecan Nut Praline Parfait
(Photo : Michael Nefdt)

HOUSE AND LEISURE / VISA BEST OF SA AWARDS

Let us not underestimate the enormity of the occasion. At a gala function this evening, the Hartford team of Cheryl Goss and Jackie Cameron step up to the winner's podium for the second consecutive year as the country's top restaurant in House and Leisure / Visa Best of SA Awards. The finalists included the national icons La Columbe and The Tasting Room in the Cape Town vicinity, and Mosaic in Gauteng, and yet, despite their remoteness, the gourmet public have proclaimed them the masters.

It's a marvellous tribute to a tireless team, forged from the ranks of a community where unemployment is the norm rather than the exception, and where skills in hospitality when Hartford House first opened its doors fourteen years ago, were almost non-existent.

The great thing is, this team is still a work-in-progress, and there are places they still have to go, yet it needs to be said that it's entirely through the encouragement and patronage of our guests, that all of this has been possible.

For those who travel thousands of miles to visit us, there is good news this morning in the government's interim budget, which relaxes our foreign exchange controls, weakening the Rand, and making travel to South Africa even more competitive. This at a time when the Australian dollar has reached the value of its American counterpart for the first time.

For more information please visit :
www.hartford.co.za

CHOWING AT HARTFORD HOUSE

Seared local beef fillet with fresh horseradish plus creamed potatoes enlivened with horseradish,
roasted garlic, juvenile green beans and herbs with a red wine sauce.
(Photo : Sally Chance)

DEREK TAYLOR
SUNDAY TRIBUNE

Derek Taylor dines grandly at the International Wine and Food Society's dinner at Hartford House an on, um, gourmet bunny chows. Yes, that's possible.

"After a marathon weekend of eating and judging, my most urgent ambitions have now narrowed down to two. First to get star chef, Jackie Cameron at Hartford House to enter a gourmet bunny chow at the next annual festival celebrating KZN's unique food contribution to the world.

Next, to talk the International Wine and Food Society's Durban chapter into launching at this successful celebration of good real food next year. The IWFS members are a delightful group of omnivores but the pleasure of strolling over the grass alongside a row of eager curry-makers' stalls may take some selling.

But first to Jackie's latest IWFS dinner. A chilly Midlands night honed the appetites for the five course dinner and Diemersfontein wine tasting - including a couple of Jackie's edible jokes.

First came a complex meeting of brown mushroom soup with shiitake mushroom powder and Midlands truffle oil. This was a welcome warming soup with a remarkable depth of flavour but I couldn't find much contribution from the shiitake powder. Nevertheless, an auspicious beginning enhanced by the perky flavour of the 2007 Diemersfontein Carpe Diem Shiraz which accompanied it.

On to a warm salad of springbok loin seared with pink peppercorns, spoom, candied walnuts, foie gras terrine and black lava salt. Spoom is a sort of Italian sherbet made with syrup and wine for fruit juice mix and then, when nearly frozen, lightened with a whipped in dose of uncooked meringue to give it air and texture. The dish was excellent, the meat cooked to perfection. Black lava salt is a new one to me, but whatever its provenance, it has a good earthy contribution to flavour.

When it came to the 2007 Diermsfontein Carpe Diem malbec - a rush of big flavours, most satisfying. This is a most interesting growth and hard to find on its own and hard to find on its own : most malbec goes to invigorating other growths in blends.

Then a tartare of Norwegian salmon with Swissland goats' cheese (Swissland is a glorious Midlands source of goats' cheese in several styles,) campfire smoked olives, micro herbs with lemon croutons. This excellent train-crash of flavours and textures with Dimersfontein's Carpe Diem chenin blanc 2009 was a pleasing and lively young partner.

The main dish of seared local beef fillet with fresh horseradish plus creamed potatoes enlivened with horseradish, roasted garlic, juvenile green beans and herbs with a red wine sauce won my instant gratitude. I am an unsuccessful fresh horseradish addict doomed to a life of mostly disappointment in my search for the magic root. The beef was outstanding - obviously grass-fed with some grain finishing from its flavour and texture. A declarative, brightly flavoured 2007 Diemersfontein pinotage supported the dish well.

"Peanut butter and syrup on toast" was Jackie's jokey introduction to the dessert. In it she had combined peanut butter with maple syrup ice-cream, sugar-glazed bananas and a vanilla crème anglaise into an intriguing nougat effect within and around the melange. A good joke, delicious in fact. A nicely edged 2009 viognier from Diemersfontein contrasted effectively with this excellent end to a memorable dinner.

Jackie Cameron is one of our top 10 national chefs and still surprising her fans. We are lucky to have her here".

For more information please visit :
www.hartford.co.za

THE LEGENDS ON TOUR

Click above to view photos from the Cape tour...
(Photo : Paula Mackenzie) 

www.landoflegends.co.za

Some years ago, we teamed up with the late great David Rattray and his wife Nicky, to form what is now popularly known as the Land Of Legends. Our purpose was to highlight the virtues of some of the finest properties in hospitality, but specifically the best in the land of the Zulu. In those days, only 4% of the international traffic patronising our respective hostelries included KwaZulu Natal on their first visit to South Africa, and the success of this venture lies in the fact that today, this figure is closer to 40%.

But then, the local offering is quite extraordinary, and this turn of events comes as little surprise to those who know the diversity, the history and the culture of our region. Couple that with the fact that 2009/10 House and  Leisure/Visa Best Of South African Awards recognised the Hartford Restaurant as the best in the land, the Phinda Homestead Lodge as number one in its category, and Fordoun's Spa as the standard bearer too, and you realise that there's not much left that wasn't covered by our membership, in the realm of national hospitality establishments.

You can take none of these things for granted though, and unless you keep the propaganda flowing, you quickly join the ranks of the forgotten. Ordinarily, we wouldn't be so pretentious as to speak for others, but with a long association with the Cape ourselves, this is a topic on which we have some understanding, having lived there and been partly educated there in our own time. We tend to forget sometimes when we live in the "mother" territory, that there is life beyond the Hottentots-Holland mountains, and sometimes, when it comes to the other side of Drakensberg, we can be quite oblivious.

So last week, the "Legends" took their products to the Western Cape to share the delights of their local properties with journos, travel agents and corporate representatives. It had been raining for a week before we got there, and then the "Sunshine Boys" turned up. What a glorious day in glorious surrounds, from The Vineyard to Waterford, in glorious old cars.

6TH AMERICAN EXPRESS PLATINUM AWARD FOR HARTFORD

Victor Strugo, Jackie Cameron and Vanessa Singh
(Photo : Hartford House)

PRIZE GIVING : TIZ THE SEASON

As matriculants prepare for their final exams and the last of their school days, our minds turn to prize-giving. In the culinary world, it's no different, as the various gourmet critics put their final pens to paper, and national competitions draw to a close.

One accolade Hartford has always treasured is the American Express Fine Dining Awards, not only for what the certificate represents on the restaurant's wall, but for the respect we have for its organisers, and especially for Victor Strugo, who holds a place among the world's most discerning food critics, let alone South Africa's.

Victor has been a deep inspiration to our team at Hartford House, and a guiding light to Jackie Cameron since her earliest days, when he first discovered her rare talent. Victor knows that at Hartford we operate in unusual circumstances, remote from most of the world, and with people who started out in life with little or no skills to speak of. Over the years, he has watched as young ladies from our community with limited educational qualifications, have grown to the point of representing this country in places like Zurich, Prague and Shangai. Victor's role with us has not been confined to the awarding of prizes; it's been an upliftment project which has changed lives.

Behind these awards is a lovely lady, Vanessa Singh. American Express are lucky to have her; her enthusiasm is infectious, her organisational capacity is evident in the way these awards are managed, and as a member of the previously disadvantaged community herself, she has scaled every ladder there has been to climb.

This past week, Jackie Cameron and one of her assistants Delli Nene, made the pilgrimage to Byzance in Lonehill, where Hartford picked up its 6^th consecutive American Express Platinum banner.