the sourcerer: Hello Sailor!

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Hello Sailor!

As my friend Smutty so succinctly puts it: hou my vas!

Finally made it to Hello Sailor for dinner.

We had:

Chicken liver paté with sourdough toast.

Disco Fries.

( skinny fries, mushroom gravy and cheese, melted under the grill. So wrong and yet... so right )

Vetkoek - light as clouds with crispy edges, curried mince and sambals.

Lamb cooked slow in a complex gravy of tomatoes, rosemary and cinnamon.

A bottomless glass of Merlot.
A toast to my dear Mom who turns 75 today.
A toast to Winter and tummy rolls.

That's chef Maggie in the background, like a dervish in the kitchen. This is my kind of place.

Twas a perfect rainy night in Observatory. Hipsters and muscle cars. Dragon breath walking back to my car.
Full as a tick.

and Fi. This is for you.

6 comments:

Marie said...: You don't have tummy rolls.

Vetkoek. Long sad sigh from this end of the world...; April 28, 2011 at 1:44 AM
the sourcerer said...: Marie - I'm only thin when I'm sad. and right now I am very, very happy!
the vetkoek was pale yellow on the inside - turmeric. and they were small and round. very different from my Ouma's.
:-); April 28, 2011 at 4:23 AM
petro said...: Dis so mooi beskryf, ek kon dit proe!; April 28, 2011 at 9:18 PM
the sourcerer said...: dankie Petro!
sjoe. so laatnag en ek luister ou blues. sou maklik nou weer daai disco fries kon eet...; April 28, 2011 at 10:28 PM
Unknown said...: Oh Wow Lily. Thanks for the pic! I drive past this often and have always thought I must take a photo for my facebook pic ;) now you have done it for me :)

Your menu at Hello Sailor is making me drool. I want to go there now!; May 5, 2011 at 2:53 PM
arcadia said...: Damn. Moet daar uitkom.; May 7, 2011 at 8:08 AM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.