The found ingredients of the Lost City: A new menu for The Palace

PRINT HEAD: The found ingredients of the Lost City

BLURB: In a new menu for The Palace, Michelin-starred chef Jan Hendrik Van der Westhuizen pays homage to South African culinary treasures - such as mielies and blackjack weeds, writes Andrea Nagel

There’s something deliciously mad about Sun City. That Las Vegas-meets-Wilderness mirage on the edge of the Pilanesberg, a place that, in Sol Kerzner's days, tried to convince the world it had six stars before anyone asked for five. The Sun City of my youth - when we'd pack into the car for a weekend away to support my dad running the eponymous marathon, but really more for those famous Sun City breakfasts - was always a sprawling fever dream of fake rocks and gold plated statues, wave pools and plastic beaches, swing bridges and lounger-lined natatoriums, conjured out of apartheid-era audacity, a bottomless buffet of bling and built in the shadow of the Bophuthatswana mountains.

Now, like a resurrected (fake) ruin, The Palace has undergone a resuscitation. The spa has been refitted, the gym rebuffed, the suites redone to bring them up to date. But what’s really risen like a phoenix from Covid's ashes is that world famous buffet breakfast.

"In a  perverse way, Covid was good for the re-establishment of Sun City, though not very good for profitability," said Sun City general manager Brett Hoppé. "We spent on the other side of a couple of hundred million rand on the refurbishment of The Palace, but there was a missing piece - the food and beverage piece - and it troubled me greatly."

Noting that the country has suffered a tremendous drain on its food and beverage talent, Hoppé added, "It's a sad testament to the development of our industry that we've created great chefs but as fast as we develop them, they're extracted. We wanted to find a chef who's firstly South African and who understands our product, who understands our people and ultimately pays homage to the food and the culture of South Africa." 

The man behind the culinary reboot of the breakfast service at The Palace Hotel’s Crystal Court is Jan Hendrik Van der Westhuizen — South Africa’s first Michelin-starred chef - who grew up in the red dust of Middelburg with its mopane trees, school braais and tinned peaches and who's now running with the white-linen wolfpack of the French Riviera. Jan Hendrik began his hospitality empire with a restaurant set in the woods of his family's Mpumalanga farm, with paintings hanging in the trees and a Persian rug across the forest floor. Three guests arrived on opening night: his mother, father, and sister. They came, they ate, they spat out the starter and refused to pay. Now, after achieving gastronomical greatness, he’s returned to the holiday place of his childhood dreams and brought with him not molecular foam, but mielies. "If there's one foundation that's solid in this country, it's this building [The Palace], the vision behind it and the memories it gave me when I was 16," said Jan. " It's the same for many other South Africans."

Jan’s vision is to revive “lost ingredients” — foods that haven’t vanished so much as slipped through the cracks of culinary relevance. They’re all over the country, clinging to fenceposts, growing between paving stones, sold in plastic bags at taxi ranks. But in Jan's hands, this humble foodstuff is exalted, and then slathered with caviar. "What we do with our food and ingredients is we tell stories," said Jan. "Not only new stories, we also like to tell old stories with a new beginning."

At the Crystal Court, food, in Jan's hands, is narrative and nostalgia. "The breakfast offering at The Palace has always been next level," said Jan the evening before we were invited to try the first serving of the new Sun City breakfast. "Over the years, as happens with most things, it's gotten slightly dusty, soft tuned, and before you know it, it's fallen into a comfort zone. But there's a new story to be told; we've got the Lost City, we've got The Palace, so we discovered the ingredients of the Lost Palace."

There'd be no dinner, Jan told us, for the next morning we'd sip mimosas while tasting more than 20 dishes made from mielies alone. Polenta, popcorns, porridges, tarts, ice creams and something that was a tortilla before it was given the Eliza Doolittle treatment.

Each season at the Crystal Court at The Palace, a new lost ingredient will take centre stage. A rotating, edible exploration of our land. One month it will be blackjack (the sticky, spiny weed that clings to your socks after a bush walk — who knew it was a superfood?) "There are millions of these things growing in my country, yet very few people eat them," said Jan. "The leaves are incredibly nutritional - 20% more than spinach."

The next month, it might be cowpeas or pigweed. The installation changes, the decor changes, the menu changes with ingredients you might see every day, but that you'll now experience in exciting different forms. "What's lost for us about the ingredients is the connection, where it comes from," said Jan. "With the menu, we'll remember the history and the quality, the nutritional value of that product. We came up with a massive list, which is so exciting."

But what’s most dazzling — and this is where Jan’s genius sharpens — is that this is breakfast as remembrance, as cultural archiving, as an exploration of our roots... and our fibres and grains. Jan’s menu says: “Here, you forgot this. It tastes amazing. And it’s ours.”

"Each season will focus on one ingredient," said Jan. "Which will totally change the interior decoration of the Crystal Court, the buffet, the tasting menu, the products, the training of the chefs and the research."

He’s assembled a band of young chefs from places such as Tswalu in the Kalahari to Clanwilliam in the Western Cape, all ready to experiment for the delight of your tastebuds. They forage and ferment, grind and dehydrate. They’ve built what may be the only breakfast in the world that could bring a post-colonial tear to your eye and leave mieliepap on your chin. "My father was a mielie boer," said Jan with a grin. "It's really a deep dive into one ingredient - we're even doing mielie with caviar. And if you don't like mielies, there's 70 other things for you to eat. Okay?"

There was a moment, during the launch, when Jan stood there — days after feeding the royal houses of Scandinavia and Monaco, he told us — talking about blackjack weeds and maize meal with a glint of madness in his eye. “Food is fashion,” he said, “and stories are important.”

He’s right. But this isn’t fashion like Milan or Paris. It's the kind of fashion that grows from Kalahari soil, that clings to identity and exists between drought and abundance. It’s fashion that feeds. And The Palace, which always dreamed it was Atlantis, finally has the food to match its mythology — a cuisine as lush and fantastical as the setting. Six stars, maybe. But thanks to Jan, now it has soul too. Sun City has rediscovered its story, and it’s being told on a plate.