8 Paternoster restaurants worth visiting

​By Roxanne Reid
You’ve spent the day exploring the Cape Columbine Nature Reserve and lighthouse, walking on the beach at Paternoster on the West Coast and kayaking in the sea. Now your stomach is growling. Luckily, there’s no way you’re going to go hungry in Paternoster, with its 14 restaurants offering everything from pizzas and burgers to seafood and fine dining. Here are 8 Paternoster restaurants worth visiting. 

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One of my favourite things to do in Paternoster is to eat out. Remember that most Paternoster restaurants are closed one or two days a week, so check ahead and book if you want to eat at a specific place. If you prefer to take it as it comes, there’s always somewhere open for visitors on any day of the week though your choices may be limited, especially on Mondays and Tuesdays after the busy weekend.

The Noisy Oyster

A chalkboard at the door of the Noisy Oyster announced, ‘We’re fully booked but fast eaters and big tippers may be considered.’ It was a fun intro to a delightfully quirky place. Best of all was the pebbled courtyard with fairy lights for a romantic setting.

Orange, yellow and blue umbrellas form part of the courtyard ceiling décor and give shade for summer lunches. But the evening we were there was verging on cold so three fires were burning for warmth and ambiance. It was so romantic that it’s small wonder the starters, mains and desserts of normal menus have been ditched for the more titillating ‘foreplay’, ‘intercourse’ and ‘afterglow’.

We’ve been here numerous times and always enjoyed friendly and efficient service as well as great food, from steak and melt-in the-mouth fish to mussels and oysters, which the menu boards refer to as West Coast Viagra. This time I had hake with a citrus fennel sauce, my husband had sirloin with béarnaise sauce and mustard. Both were full of flavour, succulent and delicious. Crème brulée and chocolate marquise with ice cream and orange syrup rounded off a perfect meal. This is fine dining in a relaxed, unpretentious atmosphere.

The Square Spoon

Another Paternoster restaurant we enjoyed was the Square Spoon, where we had lunch. Owner Louis van Staden came to chat about everything from crayfish smuggling to ways to help local people get a slice of the tourism pie. I had a delicious pear, macadamia and avo salad, with a wonderfully piquant dressing. My husband had what he called ‘a perfect prego roll’ where the steak was tender and the ciabatta freshly baked.

Service was fast and friendly and whoever plated the food had an artistic eye without being overly pernickety. Other menu items were fresh fish, mussels, oysters and prawns. For an on-the-spur-of-the-moment lunch, this was much classier and tastier than we’d expected. (PS I chuckled at the sign pointing to the ladies and gents: ‘Men to the left because women are always right!’)

Reuben’s at Abalone House

Reuben Riffel is a homegrown celebrity chef, with TV appearances and recipe books already tucked under his belt. His growing string of fine-dining restaurants includes one at the five-star Abalone House boutique hotel in Paternoster. You can sit inside the elegant restaurant with its plush pink chairs (see the photo in the intro of this post) or in a more informal setting on the deck overlooking the sea. The evening we ate on the deck in our wicker chairs was fairly nippy so the see-through blinds remained down, but I could imagine how radiant it would be in high summer, when the setting sun turns the sea pink.

The menu is small, with a handful of choices for each course. Starters included goat’s cheese soufflé, chicken livers and salads. We chose a succulent lamb shank served on mash for our main. Pork belly, rib eye steak and linefish were among the other choices. For dessert we shared a malva pudding with crème anglaise and granadilla sorbet, the granadilla giving the sweet pud a nice tang and lifting it above the ordinary. Crème brulee, chocolate truffles and cheeses also appeared on the dessert menu.

Voorstrandt

The Voorstrandt restaurant is slap-bang on the beach. The green corrugated iron building with its red roof has been there a long time, having started life as a private home. It alone seems to have escaped the developers’ rule that buildings in Paternoster should be white and designed in ‘Cape coast’ style. As with many Paternoster restaurants, menu choices are largely of the seafood variety, though fillet, burgers and deep-fried chicken also make an appearance.

We enjoyed our calamari and chips, but it was the view and ambience that were spectacular. We were early enough to watch the sunset over the sweep of the bay while three young children played on rowing boats pulled up on the sand, just an arm’s reach away from mom and dad. A dog that adopted us on the beach earlier that day reappeared to make friends with the children and a whole deckful of people.

Ouma se Kombuis

Vanessa Abrahams is the driving force behind Ouma se Kombuis (granny’s kitchen), which opened in August 2016. While she was working at a local restaurant a couple of years ago she realised that what was missing from the mix in Paternoster was fresh, homemade traditional West Coast food like bobotie, smoorsnoek, steak pies, mussel curry and melkkos. She decided this was a gap that needed to be filled.

Her husband built the wooden tables and benches that stand on the stoep and inside the old stone-walled building where sculptor Dianne Heesom-Green has made space for the restaurant until a planned waterfront development at the old fish factory gets off the ground. (This development is apparently a point of contention in Paternoster so it may take a while.) The restaurant serves a maximum of 12 people and is closed on Thursdays.

Vanessa’s cousin Carmen Jordaan, Julianna Clarke (who does all the cooking) and Charlaine Bergh are the faces of Ouma se Kombuis. They’re a jolly bunch. Carmen has a smile a mile wide and even Julianna, at first shy and quiet, has a sense of fun. Vanessa herself is a bubbly, positive person prepared to work hard for what she gets. ‘Stress? I drink stress like Coca Cola,’ she laughed.

From left: Carmen Jordaan, Charlaine Bergh, Julianna Clarke and Vanessa Abrahams

When we arrived two women were just finishing their tea and scones. We were looking for something more substantial. I ordered the bobotie, which was delicious. I liked that it came with vegetables and side salad as well as rice though I would have liked a little chutney on the side too. My husband had the steak pie which he declared tasty and ‘full of meat’. This little place is definitely something different among the Paternoster restaurants.

Ouma se Kombuis is a place to relax into West Coast time. We got chatting to local resident Anita Coraizin about Paternoster in the old days and why young today people get led astray. She grew up in Paternoster and has a memory as long as your arm. She told us that Gaaitjie and Voorstrandt – both now restaurants – used to be private houses. ‘This building,’ she pointed to the whole building of which Ouma se Kombuis is a small part, ‘is more than 100 years old and belongs to the fish factory.’

Skatkis

The best thing by far about Skatkis restaurant at the Paternoster Lodge is the view from the balcony. It looks out to sea over the beach where colourful boats go out and come back from fishing. Watch the beach activity, listen to the seagulls and spy on the locals walking past on the street below.

Breakfast is my favourite meal here, either for the fresh fruit, granola and yoghurt served in a glass as if it were a cocktail or for the vegetarian omelette with sautéed mushrooms, onions and peppadews for piquancy.

The lunch and dinner menus include seafood – from simple hake and chips to full seafood platters – as well as burgers, steak and chicken. The main part of the restaurant (inside) is fairly soulless, so try to get a table on the balcony; it’s worth booking ahead to get a spot there.

Wolfgat

Kobus van der Merwe is a forager who loves nothing more than creating Strandveld food using plants that have adapted to the harsh coastal conditions. For instance, his menus include edible succulents, seaweed and other plants that complement seafood.

​His new restaurant Wolfgat offers a tasting menu on Wed to Sun lunch, Fri & Sat evenings, seating 24 people for what he calls a two-and-a-half-hour ‘eating journey’. He doesn’t want to offer it more often or to more people because he wants to keep the harvesting of these plants sustainable. ‘That’s why I won’t use corms or tubers where you have to use the whole plant, just ones you can harvest and will regrow,’ he said.

He has developed his menu ideas through research and experimentation, reading old recipe books, and chatting to old people and botanists, anyone he can buttonhole to talk about his passion. ‘And I’m a danger to myself when I’m driving because I can’t keep my eyes on the road,’ he admits.

He used to operate at Oep ve Koep, which is owned by his parents, but Wolfgat is a much better space, with gorgeous views out to sea. The building, about 130 years old, lies above a series of calcrete chambers that were most recently occupied 2000 years ago by Khoikhoi, who ate the same kind of foods he now serves, from plants to seafood.

I haven’t tasted the food at Wolfgat but Kobus insists he’s striving to make it delicious. ‘It may be a new taste adventure so you need to have an open mind, but we’re not making Fear Factor food here,’ he quipped. Bookings are essential.

Gaaitjie

Jaco Kruger is the new chef at Gaaitjie and we’d been hoping to sample his food. But luck wasn’t on our side; it’s closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which were the days we were in town. But we ran into Jaco working on his orders at the Panty Bar at the Paternoster Hotel. While the TV blared sports, we discovered that he’s a Joburger who has worked at both the Saxon Hotel and the Cape Grace. He said he’s loving life in Paternoster and has completely redesigned the menu at Gaaitjie.

The simple whitewashed old cottage that houses the restaurant is right on the rocks next to the sea so the views are superb. The menu includes seafood as well as guest appearances by beef and lamb for those who don’t eat fish. We got chatting to a chap near the beach – it started out as a typical Toyota versus Land Rover ribbing – and he said Gaaitjie was fabulous and we must go. Maybe next time we visit Paternoster…

Other Paternoster restaurants

Other places we didn’t have time (or the capacity!) to try include Blikkie Pizzeria (with more than 20 pizza variants, as well as hake and chips, burgers), On the Rocks (on the beach near the fish market, buy your fish and slap chips in a box and eat them at picnic benches in the open air) and De See Kat (sushi, seafood, lamb curry).

Amazing to think that if you visit Paternoster you could have two meals a day, each at a different restuarant, and it would take you a week to visit all that this little town has to offer.

And I’d definitely treat myself to a second visit to the Noisy Oyster.

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Note: Paternoster is on West Coast Way’s Foodie Route, which sponsored our meal at Ouma se Kombuis, but we paid in full for our other meals.

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