Peter Tempelhoff is a chef and restauranteur in Cape Town, South Africa. While Pete lived and worked in Europe and the US, and worked with Marco Pierre White and several other well-known chefs, hell fell in love with Japanese cooking many years ago and it changed how he saw South African ingredients, which is an ongoing evolution. His fine dining restaurant Fyn combines Japanese techniques with South African ingredients, though he also the more casual restaurants Sushiya and Ramenhead, and a vineyard restaurant in Constantia named Beyond. Another restaurant at the historic Boschendal Estate, called Arum, will open in November.

Last year on a bit of a whim, while I was waiting on paperwork for my next book, I went to South Africa. Pete told me about a paleobotanist named Jan De Vynck that he was working with that was researching the cognitive development of homo sapiens in South Africa more than 100,000 years ago. The story was of particular interest to me, and Pete for that matter, because the story had everything to do with what homo sapiens ate. The species was near extinction, but the particular biodiversity of the Western Cape allowed the survive and then thrive to become the dominant species on the planet. I found it to be incredibly hopeful and a powerful reason why we need to protect biodiversity and I wrote a 10,000 word three part story on the New Worlder newsletter about it.

This was my only time in South Africa. My only time south of Morocco on the African continent, and it was nothing like I expected. Aside of the straight up physical beauty of the Cape Town area, the extreme level of biodiversity and how it resulted in all sorts of ingredients new to modern kitchens was quite the surprise. Many of them don’t look, smell or taste like anything I’ve ever tried before. Pete’s restaurants are a good place to find them and he’s been building different gardens to support his needs and encouraging other farmers to grow them to take the pressure off of wild resources. I see South Africa as a place we’ll talk much more about in terms of gastronomy and restaurants in the years to come and it’s because of what’s native. 

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Host: Nicholas Gill
Co-host: Juliana Duque
Produced by Nicholas Gill & Juliana Duque
Recording & Editing by New Worlder 
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