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Africa Privé · The Collection

Culinary Privé

Africa’s Private Food & Wine Division

From private cellars in the Winelands to a single fire under the stars in the bush — Africa’s finest food and wine, privately arranged, from the table you choose to the chef who cooks for you alone.

Africa’s finest food and wine, privately arranged — from a rare vertical in a Winelands cellar to a single chef cooking for you alone under the stars.

Five Pillars

Wine Privé
private cellars, rare verticals, winemaker meetings, private blending and helicopter vineyard-hopping across Stellenbosch, Franschhoek, Constantia, Paarl, Hemel-en-Aarde and Swartland
Fire Privé
open-fire cooking, boma dining, Kalahari embers and bushveld technique, a cuisine in its own right rather than a rustic aside to fine dining
Safari Culinary Privé
bush breakfasts, chef’s tables inside safari villas, and private cellars found deep in the wilderness
Winemaker Privé
access beyond the tasting room: the owner, the winemaker, the cellar master, vertical tastings, create-your-own blends and pre-release barrel tastings
Chef Privé
the restaurant brought to you: a private chef, sommelier, cellar and menu delivered into your residence, villa, yacht or private train

Fire Privé

Fire Privé sits at the heart of the division, in three registers: fire as the cuisine, at kitchens such as Marble in Johannesburg and VUUR in Stellenbosch; fire as the experience, in bush dinners, boma dining and dining on the beach; and fire as African heritage, in the braai, the potjie and the slow discipline of ember cooking.

Tables Worth the Journey

Klein JAN, Tswalu Kalahari
an immersive culinary journey into the Kalahari from Chef Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen, dining below ground and rooted in a private food-provenance and garden programme
Delaire Graff Estate, Stellenbosch
wine, fine dining and art, with private dining rooms set above the vineyards
La Colombe, Constantia
on the Silvermist wine estate, one of the Cape’s most celebrated tables
Singita
private cellars, seasonal produce, bush dinners and the Singita Culinary School
Royal Malewane, Greater Kruger
private villa to private chef to bush dinner to wine cellar to pairing to safari breakfast to sundowner, as one continuous thread
Boschendal
estate to vineyard to farm to kitchen to table, in a single working landscape

The African Fire Table — six guests, one fire, one chef, one wine cellar. No restaurant. No dining room. Only the stars overhead.

Signature Restaurants

Cape Town & the Winelands:
twelve tables worth the journey

A guide to twelve signature restaurants across three areas — Cape Town & Surrounds, Stellenbosch and Franschhoek. Each entry covers the chef, the cuisine and what makes the room worth booking. Africa Privé reserves every table for you, and can build the day around it.

Cape Town & Surrounds

Six tables spanning the city bowl, the Atlantic seaboard and the Constantia valley — the closest wine country sits inside Cape Town’s own city limits.

FYN

CBD

FYN

Chef-patron Peter Tempelhoff and executive chef Bea Hesse run the most decorated table in South Africa right now. FYN was named Eat Out Woolworths Restaurant of the Year for 2026, has held a place on the World’s 50 Best Extended List every year since 2021 (peaking at 37th in 2022), and became the first restaurant in Africa to earn three stars under the Food Made Good sustainability standard.

The name comes from fynbos, the Cape’s own plant kingdom, and the cooking follows through on it: modern African cuisine sharpened by Japanese technique and restraint, built around seasonality and terroir rather than imported luxury. The room occupies the fifth floor of Speaker’s Corner in the CBD, styled in “quiet contrasts” — dark leather and warm wood against expansive city views, with an underwater seaweed art installation running through the space. FYN runs an Experience Dinner as its main tasting menu, alongside dedicated pescatarian and plant-based versions, across lunch and dinner seatings.

Old Biscuit Mill, Woodstock

SALON

Chef-patron Luke Dale Roberts — the name behind The Test Kitchen — opened SALON with executive chef Carla Schulze executing his vision. It won Africa’s Best New Restaurant at the World Culinary Awards, and the concept is explicitly autobiographical: a tasting menu built from Roberts’ own career across multiple countries, translated through Cape ingredients.

Diners choose between a six-course Explorer Menu or the eight-course Global Tasting Menu, each pairable with wine flights, tea, or signature cocktails. The food travels — a cheese-and-pickle sandwich nodding to Roberts’ time in the UK, a Sicilian caponata with octopus and line fish, a Moroccan lamb neck tagine with baba ganoush, flambéed duck à l’orange — before landing back home with fynbos-honey desserts. The room itself, inside the Old Biscuit Mill, opens through a bright, arched entrance into a space pitched between sophisticated and unpretentious.

V&A Waterfront

Pier

Head chef John Norris-Rogers runs this La Colombe Restaurant Group outpost right on the Pierhead, trading on one of the most photographed views in the city. The kitchen calls its own cooking “an ode to the ocean”: contemporary fine dining built almost entirely around seafood — oysters, smoked mussels, octopus, yellowfin tuna, hake, langoustine — executed with technical precision rather than showmanship.

Two menus anchor the offering: a lunch-only Spring Menu and the full Chef’s Menu tasting experience, each with a considered plant-based alternative running alongside it. Signature courses include oysters served with Cap Classique, a smoked mussel tart, octopus beignets, and springbok paired with Jerusalem artichoke. Pier holds three stars at the 2026 Eat Out Awards and a place on the World’s 50 Best Discovery list.

Camps Bay

Salsify at The Roundhouse

Chef Ryan Cole took Eat Out Restaurant of the Year for 2025 and a debut spot at 88th on the World’s 50 Best Extended List the same year, cooking out of a landmark building inside the national park at Camps Bay with sweeping views over the Atlantic.

The menu is a seven-course Cape-Asian tasting experience, but Cole’s own framing is less about fusion and more about restraint: “a chef’s confidence is shown via what he can take off a plate instead of what’s added on.” He fishes much of the seafood himself, and the philosophy — “what grows together goes together” — drives a hyperlocal, seasonal menu over imported luxury ingredients. Plates have included perilla leaf with yellowtail, coconut and lime, and Zambian honey with mead vinegar and pepino melon.

La Colombe

Silvermist Wine Estate, Constantia

La Colombe

Franck Dangereux founded La Colombe in 1996 on the Constantia Uitsig farm. Chef proprietor Scot Kirton took over as executive chef at 27 when Dangereux’s successor departed, rebuilt the kitchen through a difficult period, and moved the restaurant to its current home at Silvermist Wine Estate in 2014. James Gaag — Kirton’s right hand since the early days and a partner since 2017 — has run the kitchen as executive chef since 2018.

The cooking is intricate French-Asian fine dining, plated in a stylish, minimalist room set against the Constantia Valley. It sits at 55th on the 2025 World’s 50 Best Extended List, part of a broader La Colombe Restaurant Group that today also includes Pier, La Petite Colombe, Foxcroft, Protégé and Epice.

Beau Constantia

Chef’s Warehouse

Chef Ivor Jones runs this Liam Tomlin Group outpost from a sleek, open-plan kitchen looking straight out over the Constantia wine valleys — one of the more dramatic views of any restaurant in the Winelands. The format sits between a tasting menu and a shared small-plates meal: contemporary tapas, ordered course by course rather than all at once.

Jones cooks with produce partly grown on the estate’s own farm, working with ethical local producers, and leans into a South African base fused with Thai and Vietnamese technique. The menu shifts with the seasons and regularly puts overlooked ingredients front and centre, paired with Beau Constantia’s own wine list.

Stellenbosch

Four tables built around the town’s own Bordeaux-style reds and Chenin Blanc, from a historic wine estate to a converted post office.

Jordan Wine Estate

Jordan Restaurant

Head chef Marthinus Ferreira has run this kitchen since 2022, when he took over from George Jardine after Jardine’s 12-year tenure. Ferreira previously owned and ran Dw eleven-13 in Johannesburg, and brings a modern approach shaped by time working alongside Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal.

The cooking is contemporary farm-style: seasonal, locally sourced, and built to sit alongside Jordan’s own wine list — the estate is one of the more established names in Stellenbosch for Bordeaux-style reds and Chenin Blanc. The format is a rotating chef’s tasting menu, with a simpler à la carte lunch offered through the winter months, served with vineyard views over the Stellenbosch valley.

Stellenbosch

Post & Pepper

Chef-owner Jess van Dyk runs this kitchen out of South Africa’s oldest post office building in central Stellenbosch, with a stated philosophy that “fine dining should feel welcoming” rather than formal. The cooking reinterprets South African classics with an Asian twist — the signature is a crispy pork belly finished with miso caramel — described on its own terms as “playful yet refined,” reworking familiar dishes with bold, unexpected flavour combinations.

The restaurant runs lunch and dinner menus, including vegetarian options, and has built its reputation as much on hospitality and atmosphere as on technique, positioning itself as Stellenbosch’s answer to fine dining without the stiffness.

Quoin Rock Wine Estate, Stellenbosch

Quartz

Quartz, the relaxed fine-dining restaurant at Quoin Rock Wine Estate, builds its à la carte menu “around the wine” rather than the other way round, drawing on the quartz-flecked Simonsberg soil the estate sits on for its “quiet luxury” framing.

The food is seasonally driven South African cooking to international standard, served with personalised service, Wednesday to Sunday, lunch only (12:00–3:30pm).

Stellenbosch

MERTIA

Chef Matt van den Berg works alongside founder Marais Kirsten-Uys, who named the restaurant for her grandmother. There’s no à la carte menu — only an evolving four-course tasting menu built around whatever is at its organic, seasonal peak, sometimes drawing on truffles, watermelon or heirloom tomatoes from the family farm. Tableside cooking is part of the experience, with an open interaction between kitchen and floor.

MERTIA won Service Excellence honours at both the 2025 Luxe Restaurant Awards and the 2025 Eat Out Woolworths Restaurant Awards, and holds a two-star rating at both.

Franschhoek

Two estate kitchens in the country’s Méthode Cap Classique and fine-dining hub.

Leeu Estates, Franschhoek

La Petite Colombe

Head chef Peter Duncan runs this La Colombe Restaurant Group sister property, set among the vineyards of Leeu Estates with panoramic views over the Franschhoek Valley and Pass. It earned three stars at the 2026 Eat Out Awards.

The cooking is contemporary fine dining with a strong South African accent, guided by Duncan’s stated philosophy of “creativity, community and connection.” Two tasting formats run side by side — a shorter Spring Special and the full Chef’s Experience — both with vegetarian versions, moving through courses like sourdough with snoek, nduja, chicken liver and miso, and finishing with a dessert trolley.

Maison, Franschhoek

Chef’s Warehouse

Chef-partner David Schneider, part of the Liam Tomlin Group, cooks out of Maison Estate — a working farm setting with a stoep, an oak-shaded lawn, nearby vineyards and, by the restaurant’s own description, “the odd chicken.” It’s the most relaxed of the Group’s tapas-format restaurants, built for a long lunch rather than a formal tasting menu.

Schneider runs an ethical, farm-to-table kitchen: whole animals and whole fish bought in and broken down on site, seasonal produce sourced from local growers. The food is playful South African cooking in small-plate form — the “Chefs’ Happies” starter platter and house-made condiments like apricot chutney typify the style — with vegetarian and vegan options given equal weight rather than treated as an afterthought.

In Pictures

Restaurant Films

The tables, on film

Included Across the House

Every journey, privately arranged

Personalisation
every itinerary is individually created
Exclusivity
private experiences beyond conventional travel
Authenticity
meaningful connections with Africa’s landscapes, cultures and people
Luxury
exceptional accommodation, service and attention to detail
Memories
moments that remain forever

Planning Your Journey

Itineraries are built to order

There are no fixed departures and no standard packages. Every journey is designed around your interests, your party and your dates.

Tell us what you have in mind and one of our travel designers will prepare a proposal.

Plan your Culinary Privé journey

Your journey begins with a complimentary private consultation.

Request a Proposal