Lunch with the goats – a gastronomic experience at Fairview

Fairview Goatshed

The tempta­tion to play with the word 'fair' when applied to Fairview Wine Estate is great – it more than lives up to its name. The Wine and Cheese farm, just off Suid-Agter Paarl Road, lies in one of the 'fairest' set­tings pos­sible, set behind Paarl's ubi­quit­ous 'rock', its park­ing area littered with pretty, shady trees and its entrance utterly dom­in­ated by a fairly ingeni­ous tower com­plete with spiral stair­case, fea­tur­ing three of their Swiss Saanen goats — that on this par­tic­u­lar Sunday, looked very much the way I felt, con­sid­er­ing it was prob­ably 40 degrees in the shade, of which there was not much in their domain ...

The Goatshed, Fairview's slightly upmar­ket barn-style/foodhall res­taur­ant tout­ing Mediterranean 'fare' (couldn't res­ist) and a chance to sample up to twenty five of the farm's pre­dom­in­antly goats' cheeses, together with their wines, is extremely pop­u­lar. It was just as well we had booked a table as when we arrived, just before 1pm, the place was lit­er­ally hum­ming. It helped that the heat had all but driven every­one into the air-conditioned former wine cel­lar interior – its clay-tiled floors, high ceil­ings, wooden fur­niture and thor­oughly rus­tic atmo­sphere a bonus on a day when sit­ting out­side, des­pite the gor­geous scenery, was pretty warm (and we thought we'd scored by book­ing outside!)

Outside, the grapev­ine smothered bal­cony below, and the slightly cooler bluegum latte-roofed ver­andah offered a fur­ther smat­ter­ing of tables, which, provided there is a breeze, are won­der­ful to sit at – beau­ti­ful lawns and a trick­ling stream and water fea­tures. There was evid­ence of ice buck­ets on vir­tu­ally every table, as people drank copi­ous amounts, not always water, and the shouts of chil­dren dip­ping them­selves in the little stream bey­ond our tables added fur­ther still to the sense of balmy days, good food and little else to do.

The Goatshed has got the 'food exper­i­ence' com­bin­a­tion right. One isn't there purely for the menu, but for the exper­i­ence whilst eat­ing the food that makes it taste all the finer for the sur­round­ing com­bin­a­tion of beau­ti­ful views and alfresco din­ing exper­i­ence. It's no sur­prise that the food is good as the former owner of the Mimosa Lodge in Montagu, Andreas Küng, a qual­i­fied archi­tect who had a change of heart due to his love of food, is the chef. The res­taur­ant also employs rougly 25 formerly unem­ployed people from the sur­round­ing wine­lands as bakers, waiters and wine stewards.

And the food was good. Nothing fancy or intim­id­at­ing, although there were a selec­tion of clev­erly com­bined salads and bis­tro meals that work per­fectly for lazy sum­mer Sundays – farm salad that com­bines roas­ted veget­ables, cherry toma­toes and toasted seeds, smoked trout salad, beef fil­let carpac­cio with toasted pine nuts, gruyère shav­ings and more, duck liver paté, warm stir-fried spring­bok, beef biltong salad, a chicken pie, ostrich medal­lions, line fish, pork spare ribs, lamb curry, beef fil­let and on and on....

But the star of the show was the cheese plat­ters them­selves, and the restaurant's range of artis­anal breads that are not only served at the table to accom­pany cheese plat­ters, but are for sale in the res­taur­ant. Their range of ciabatta, pan­ini, sour doughs, ryes, bagels and a few sig­na­ture breads are simply heav­enly! You can taste that the res­taur­ant enlis­ted the help of Johan Sörberg, who owns his own baker­ies in Stockholm in Sweden, to coach the bak­ing team...

We settled for the smoked snoek salad, a truly heav­enly com­bin­a­tion of cel­ery, red onions, green apples, white grapes, tur­meric pota­toes and snoek tossed together in a light yoghurt, lemon juice and olive oil dress­ing, served with moskon­fyt that gave it a won­der­ful fla­vour; a couple of pan­inis (made on the premises; a truly unique ver­sion of the usual doughy white bread) served with pesto, roas­ted veget­ables and grated farm­house ched­dar and a cheese plat­ter to share. There was enough food to feed an army, the dec­ad­ence was enorm­ously pleas­ing, and the com­bin­a­tion of the food wonderful.

The cheese plat­ter arrived with a gen­er­ous por­tion of sliced bread, and our little one was brought even more farm­house bread of his own to have with grated cheese and but­ter – kid­die heaven (and they charged us vir­tu­ally noth­ing for his meal, which may have been an over­sight, but I felt was incred­ibly generous).

Cheese included camem­bert, brie, bleu en blanc, blue rock (a par­tic­u­larly creamy roque­fort), white rock with cran­berry (my per­sonal favour­ite), cream cheese with black pep­per, cream cheese with sweet chilli (another num ver­sion) and crot­tin. Cheese plat­ters come in 8 choice, 10 choice, and I think 12 choice, plat­ters and are a must when there for any meal.

Fairview's pop­u­lar Goats do Roam wines are served in 200ml carafes or by the bottle, and, provided you don't man­age to upend most of the wine onto the floor as we did, are thor­oughly enjoy­able. The res­taur­ant does spe­cial group break­fast set menus, and gives early bird bikers and cyc­lists a 15% dis­count on break­fast – you have only to pro­duce your hel­met as evid­ence of hav­ing made it out there!

There is also a deli corner that offers a stream of sliced cured meats, pre­serves, jams, chut­neys, nou­gat, goats' milk fudge, and of course, cheese by the kilo­gram (although you don't really score by buy­ing from the farm as the price is only just lower than what you would pay in your local supermarket).

We roun­ded off the won­der­ful meal with a scoop of the most creamy, homemade blue­berry ice cream with a piece of short­bread, and a couple of cap­pucci­nos. The Goatshed claims the best cof­fee in the Cape, but I con­fess it was pos­sibly that much too warm a day to be thor­oughly con­vinced by this assertion.

But the unan­im­ous con­clu­sion of the meal was that we resolved to return to par­take of the break­fast menu, or to sample the winter menu, which is bound to be full of soups and roast toasty some­thing or other, hmm mm....

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