Cape Convention Centre of Culinary Disaster

The stunned looks shown by attendees during last week’s Cape Wine extravaganza had not so much to do with the regal quality of the South African wines on show as with the horrors of the culinary offerings dished up at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) where the three-day event was held. The hundreds of international guests present at this event in a city frequently alluded to as one of the world’s foremost foodie destinations must have, at lunch time, tried to catch a glimpse of Table Mountain to see whether they had not been misplaced, instead ending up in a rural Pakistani boarding school where the Urdu catering-staff were being assisted by tea-ladies from Yorkshire.

As an attendee, I first experienced the vicious onslaught from the CTICC caterers at the Coffee on the Square café situated at the lobby that exits to the Westin Hotel. The show had been busy during the morning, and I managed to zip out of the expansive, throbbing hall in hope of a restorative bite, finding myself seated at the Coffee on the Square’s al fresco patio. On the menu were sandwiches and burgers, but wishing to bypass the gluten for now, I opted for the dish of nachos and a Coke Zero. Typical simple convention fare and undemanding in its execution, one would have assumed.

The Coke was good and cold. As for the nacho dish, well, this looked like it had been prepared by a colour-blind Mexican who was consuming more of his drug-lord’s wares than he was selling.

In the middle of the plate, a bowl, but to this one will get later. Scattered around the bowl was a layer of corn nacho-chips covered by a pus-yellow layer of gooey melted matter that, I supposed, was cheese. Scattered atop this expanse were clunks of cold, stiff sour-cream which was probably meant for spreading across the nacho-cheesy minefield. And would indeed have been possible had a blow-torch been on hand.

A further attempt to provide dimension to the dish came in the form of the traditional partner to any nacho-plate, namely guacamole. This staple of Mexican cuisine involves the mashing of fresh avocado pears with lime-juice, chilli, garlic and cilantro into a fresh, green mass. Hardly Cordon Bleu stuff.

This particular café, however, was a sucker for tradition not. Instead, the guacamole offered was purchased from some store, being squeezed from a tube onto the nachos in dense, pasty threads of a pale, insipid green the colour and form of Leprechaun turds.

Now for the bowl in the middle of this all. If this bowl had been filled with red, spicy salsa one could have poured the salsa over the offensively dull mine-field of nacho chips, cheese and Leprechaun excrement. This was not to be, as the bowl held a chunky green salad, serving no purpose.

I scarfed-down a few chips, taking care so as not to be attacked and throttled by the acrid cords of melted cheese and avoiding by all means any splattering of green fake guacamole landing on my new shirt. Needless to say, the dish’s flavour was as bland and innocuous as its visual appeal.

A night of vinous frivolity and some deep sleep does tend to erase even the most vividly bad memories, thus the very next morning I again found myself at the same Coffee on the Square for breakfast. Now, I don’t often breakfast outside of two espressos and a short cigar, but sometimes the empty feeling brought on by a slight hangover leads to a primal urge for a good morning feed. Especially with a full-day of work in the CTICC’s Cape Wine hall lying ahead.

Seated inside the café this time, I downed two espressos before perusing the menu and deciding upon the Sausage Breakfast, which would hopefully provide the correct level of sustenance and artery-clogging inner comfort to get me through the day. One would have added bacon to the breakfast, but for possible Halaal reasons, pork is not available.

The plate arrived and my mood lifted at the sight of two fried eggs, over-easy and a cheerfully scarlet sliver of fried tomato. Curiosity was evoked by the Sausage Breakfast’s two, well, sausages. Put it this way, if they say Sausage here, they mean it. The linear, stiff beams of sausage were of a substantial enough length to warrant opening their own OnlyFans page, with a direct link to PornHub.

Worrying was that the main feature of this well-endowed breakfast plate were uniform in length and mechanically cylindrical, obviously having been churned out en masse to industrial volumes. This assumption was confirmed upon cutting a morsel from the sausage, the knife easily breaking through the casing and falling through the interior.

This was not meat, but slurry blasted from an animal carcass and then spun and blended into a slimy mass before a thickening agent had allowed the goo to set into sausage format. The artificial flavourants were overpowering, and after a few bites simply became intolerable – I feared that consuming both sausages would result in me having to endure the rest of the day’s event covered in an unsettling, disturbing MSG-induced orange glow and being mistaken for a Nepalese wine-merchant.

For the rest of the show, I avoided the CTICC’s food on offer, although I did look around enough to see that this was lacking in the purported “international” standard. Boarding-school pails of curries and shredded meat lying in glistening pools of fatty sauce. Cardboard-inspired pizza slices. Cold, stiff wraps with gooey interiors.

A ghastly offering, requiring a conference seeking improvement and one where I’ll try hard as hell to track-down that Leprechaun. And really make him kak.