Experience the French chic of Yumcious Café
There’s a dash of French chic about Yumcious Cafe: its pavement cafe tables overlook the leafy open-air square of the Cape Quarter, and the bright and airy interior is full of flowers, glass and mirrors. Combined with Jenny’s down-to-earth approach to food and warm hospitality, it’s the perfect place to relax over a leisurely and satisfying lunch, or sinfully delicious cake and coffee.
Opened in December, the cafe is just across the square from her relocated CooksPlayground premises, so she’s hands-on in both places, emerging from the kitchen to put the final touches to sauces and dressings at the Yumcious table, greeting customers and taking the time to chat, later heading over to CooksPlayground for a cookery event. You’d think her life was full enough with TV and radio appearances, new cookery book and her successful raft of Giggling Gourmet services, without opening a cafe too, but it was something she couldn’t resist.
“I love feeding people. I’m creating recipes all the time, I dream about them. There are only so many recipe books I can write each year, and I can’t give everything to my husband and children. Yumcious is somewhere for me to share my creations.”
The ever-changing, pay-by-weight Yumcious table, laden with twelve different salads (and not a lettuce leaf in sight), bears witness to Jenny’s creativity. At lunch time abundant bowls of colourful veggies fill the eye: from fresh lemony courgettes, to charred aubergines, roasted sweet potato with sesame oil, and green beans drenched in soy and sherry. A platter of Moroccan roast chicken, followed by rare roast beef, ties the flavours from around the world together.
Everything on the menu is home-baked too, from the rolls, the buns supporting the stacked-high signature burger, to the enticing selection of decadent cakes: rich chocolate, gently spiced carrot, pretty bowls of swirly pink meringues, which take centre stage under gleaming glass domes and taste as good as they look. And I’m looking forward to a return visit to explore the breakfast menu. With so much choice of frittatas, cannelloni pancakes, sumptuous stewed fruit on granola, or French toast with honey-orange butter, Yumcious looks set to become a home from home for Cape Quarter locals.
Taste for yourself:
Yumcious Cafe
083 255 3477
gigglinggourmet.com
This article originally appeared in Neighbourhood, Sunday Times.
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