Eating Out

Our favorite restaurant in Cape Town, the place where we go often enough that we're practically regulars, isn't some place that serves traditional African fare. You'd think that, since we took the trouble to come all the way from New York to spend a year here, we'd want to take this opportunity to eat a bunch of oxtail stew and sample all the local delicacies.

We certainly are making an effort to try at least one of everything while we're here, but the place we go to most often would actually be right at home in Brooklyn. They serve pizza.

Well, gourmet pizza. With salmon and blue cheese and other vaguely interesting toppings. But it's still pizza.

The restaurant is called Diva, and it's located in the neighborhood whose name gives us so much trouble.

If we were on vacation, Katie and I would scoff at eating pizza in Africa, or ordering the mezes platter in Italy, or getting Thai food in Turkey.

But we learned quickly that you can't challenge your taste buds every day with new stuff, and you need to mix in some comfort food along with your culinary adventures. That's why I keep making tuna casserole at home.

We did eat at a fantastic restaurant last Friday night, though, that serves "Cape Malay" food. That's the term given (by whitey) to all the slaves they imported from West Africa and Asia after the colonial government passed a law that said that slavery was a-okay. . . just as long as you don't enslave the locals. I think that was considered progressive legislation at the time.

Anyway, Cape Malay food is a mixture of the food from some of those slave cultures, and the curries are sweeter than your usual Indian curry. It was fantastic.

I kept eating until I was the last one in the entire restaurant with food still in front of me, and until the waitress came by a third time to ask if she could take my plate.