Briquette started with a fire in a back garden in Cape Town and the sort of afternoon that quietly turned into an evening.
Briquette started with a fire in a back garden in Cape Town and the sort of afternoon that quietly turned into an evening.
We cook over coals because that is how we grew up cooking, and because fire is inconvenient and unforgiving and gives you nothing for free, but give it the best ingredients we can find and good salt and somebody paying attention and very little else is required.
That somebody is usually Johnny, our cook and firestarter and resident eccentric, and his food is a family tree with questionable record keeping, Afrikaner and English and Cape Malay all in the same afternoon, the things our mothers made and the things somebody's ouma definitely made better.
A braaibroodjie next to a green masala sosatie, kudu tartare before milk tart, really good steak and really cold wine and probably too much butter.
Nothing here is precious. Bring your parents or your oldest friends or somebody you are trying to impress, and put everything in the middle.
Briquette is not an old Cape Town institution.
Not yet anyway.
Until then we keep the fire going.
FOOD BY
JOHN JOSEPH
John Joseph
Johnny Hamman cooks as John Joseph, two names and one man.
Private feasts, long dinners built more like theatre than service, and restaurants along the way including Fifty Five Croissants and Osteria Prego. Always generous, usually a little bit strange.
Briquette brings him back to something simpler. Fire, very good ingredients, a lot of nostalgia and the pleasure of feeding people.
