Welcome to the first installation of Rawkin the Globe, a segment I have been wanting to add to this blog for quite some time now! My hope is to share the raw food eateries I have visited around the world with you, so when you are travelling, you have a good base to start your raw food exploration from. I have little piles of business cards from raw restaurants and health food stores around the world stacked on my desk just waiting to be written up online.
Last week I was in Cape Town visiting with two of my good friends, Anne and Melissa, as Anne recently moved there. Cape Town has a city center called the CBD (central business district), but that is only one small part of the city. In fact, Cape Town is more than a city--it is an assortment of mountains, vineyards, beaches, townships, and living/working complexes spread over a very vast area. You've probably assumed this, but Africa is really big and the bottom tip is no exception!
Before I hopped on the 11 hour flight from Paris to Cape Town, (a small aside, despite the distance, as I was flying north to south, there was only a one hour time zone difference. It was amazing to travel such a distance and to not have jet lag!), I did a quick search on the Internet to check out the raw food scene in South Africa. Any raw restos to check out? None that I could find online. Any locally made raw food products to check out? Thanks to the website Living Food for Africa, I did find two names that piqued my interest: Earthshine and Superfoods.
Baobab fruit
What luck! My friend's pad was just a 10 minute walk from the Superfoods store in Westlake, in the southern suburbs of Cape Town. So on my second morning I walked over in the early morning African heat to check out the store and talk to the people there. And what a great introduction to raw food and superfoods in Africa. The store offers a huge variety of superfoods that they sell under their own brands (both Superfoods and Rawlicious), a range of locally made artisanal raw chocolate (Fine&Raw, Honest, O'Natural), kitchen equipment, books and DVDs, supplements, etc. I picked up a package of kelp noodles (I have never tried them!), several different raw cacao bars for us to sample, homemade raw chocolate cookies (delicious!), and a pack of organic baobab fruit powder. I have not yet tried the baobab, but the package says it is a superfood from the African Baobab tree that tastes like "caramel pear with subtle tones of grapefruit." It has high levels of dietary fibre, pectic, calcium, antioxidants, vitamin C, iron potassium, and magnesium. Sounds good to me! I think I am going to add it to smoothies to start, I'll let you know how it tastes and interacts with water.
Rawkin the Globe - Cape Town
Visiting food markets
At Superfoods, I ordered a green smoothie with cacao for breakfast, and while I waited they offered me a sample of tamarillo. A tamarillo is a mix between a tomato and a guava. You can check out the picture of this interesting fruit in the slideshow above. I thought it was good, but it doesn't hold a candle to my current favorite food I discovered in South Africa--gooseberries! I previously knew them as Incan berries, and in Cape Town I had multiple opportunities to eat them fresh. I am in love. While ringing up my purchases, the owner took the time to write down recommended food markets for me to visit on the weekend. Her two recommendations were the EarthFair Food Market held every Friday in Tokai, and the Gaia Food Market held every other Sunday in Constantia Village.
The EarthFair market has artisanal food, but it is not all vegan or raw. I had a great morning there--had a juice by Dr. Juice, a superfood smoothie, picked up fresh gooseberries, chatted with a woman from By Nature, a company that makes a large range of organic dried fruits, nuts and seeds (I bought a bag of dried olives which are absolutely amazing, dried pineapple, and a fresh batch of macadamia nuts), and had a big plate of different salads (mango and avo, beetroot and apple, and cabbage and pear) while watching the South Africa vs. New Zealand cricket match. As I was waiting for my friends I had a great discussion with a woman about my composting woes. She recommends a method using bokashi--something for me to learn more about.
On Sunday we checked out Gaia Food Market, and this is the place to be if you are a raw foodist, or if you love good fresh vegan food. There was vegan Indian food and fresh pressed juices, By Nature was present here too, and Earthshine had a table selling flax crackers, kale chips, superfoods, and three varieties of raw pizza. The previous Wed. night we had ordered a pizza from Earthshine for dinner (yes, raw pizza delivery!) and had really enjoyed it, so Anne and I picked up a few more slices which I enjoyed on the plane that night back to Paris.
Two great discoveries at Gaia were RawLean and Raw Religion. RawLean offers raw food classes, and had samples of different flavors of sprouted and dehydrated organic buckwheat to try. After trying all of them (multiple times!), I bought the cinnamon & date buckwheat, which I have been enjoying with fresh fruit and brazil nut mylk for breakfast this week, and the wasabi buckwheat, which is amazing on salads and topping raw soups. I am developing a true love of buckwheat... if only I could sprout it properly. I blame the quality of the seeds I am getting in Paris, but that is probably not where the problem lies. ;)
Another amazing table was offered by Raw Religion, offering hand-crafted vegan raw cheezes (soft and hard), cookies, crackers, raw chocolate, coconut wraps, banana crepes... the mom and daughter team sell at food markets in Cape Town and offer a full raw menu in addition to a traditional African cuisine menu at Africa Cafe on Shortmarket Street downtown. If I had had one more day I would have loved to visit their restaurant, but I had to suffice with trying all of their samples, eating a coconut wrap for lunch, and purchasing raw chocolate cookies for the plane. Delicious food, I felt blessed by their religion! :)
And in my final hours in South Africa, I visited the Boost juice bar on the arrivals floor of the Cape Town International Airport to spend the remainder of my Rand on a pineapple berry juice before jumping on my flight.
In conclusion, I would state that there is a thriving raw food scene in Cape Town, but it takes some investigating to find it. At first glance, the cuisine is very meat focused (think game - ostrich, warthog, beef, kudu, etc.), but at all the restaurants we visited there was always a delicious veggie option, and the area offers a great variety of fresh fruits and veggies. I am sure there is much more going on in the raw food and health food scene than what I saw. But for a one week visit, I was really happy with the great food, products and people that I discovered.
- If you are from or familiar with Cape Town, do you have another recommendation for raw foodists to check out when in town?
- Have you used baobab fruit before? Any recipe recommendations?
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