Chef Pons, Gardens, Cape Town: Restaurant Review

Chef Pons
12 Mill Street
Gardens, Cape Town | Map

Category: Casual
Fare: Eclectic Asian
Price range: Medium-to-High
Open for: Dinner
Under review: Dinner
SA Blog recommends? Go Somewhere Else

Snippet
Like the food, the service was unimpressive. Heidi spent the better part of half an hour being ignored and the waitress challenged me when I said the food was not what we expected.

(See full review below.)

This outing cost: R100 per person
Including tip? Yes
Including wine? Yes
Food score (out of 10): 3
Service score (out of 10): 4
Reservations? Essential

Contact Information
Closed? Sundays
Tel: +27 (0) 21 465 5846
Review
Besides the dishes themselves, what I like about Asian food is its aesthetics - the sculpted carrots, coriander sprigs, beansprouts and sliced chiles that garnish most meals. But it seems Chef Pon has dispensed with all of this in favour of wilted lettuce leaves - iceberg, no less.

Readers of SouthAfricaLogue might recall Ben and his Lovely Assistant - moi - constantly being thwarted by Chef Pons. Too full to accommodate us, losing our reservations, being referred elsewhere…

The biggest disappointment of them all? Actually eating there!

Yet it promised much. A popular restaurant with a pan-Asian menu featuring all the favourites: aromatic crispy duck, green curry, nasi goreng, tom yum kung. Heidi - fresh from Liverpool, UK - and I thought we’d hit the jackpot.

Sadly, everything turned out to be a variation on boring old Chinese. Our starters, Vietnamese and Thai spring rolls, were deep-fried and full of cabbage. The listed ingredients, like the garnishes, were strangely absent. A minor lapse, we thought.

But the mains were no better. My Indonesian-style mee goreng was peppered with chunks of raw onion and gamey chicken. Heidi called it a “mee goreng smoortjie“ (Afrikaans for onion and tomato mixture). Her crispy duck - a grizzled-looking and unadorned breast that lay forlornly on the plate - tasted like Chicken McNuggets.

With both of us developing stomach aches, we ruled out the possibility of dessert.

Like the food, the service was unimpressive. Heidi spent the better part of half an hour being ignored and the waitress challenged me when I said the food was not what we expected.

We will not be back - except as guests of its much better, less pretentious and cheaper sister restaurant, the Asian Street Bar.

Also reviewed in: Rossouw’s Restaurants