Belly of the Beast was one of the first restaurants on Harrington Street, and with a handful of other destinations helped elevate the East City Precinct.
It’s fine-dining, but an informal approach. An award-winning restaurant developed around the idea: ditch the menu, the food waste and the choices – the chefs will take care of that for you.
Founders Neil Swart and Anouchka Horn create a tightly curated tasting menu served to everyone in the room, in this intimate 30-seater space the was once a motorbike workshop.
There’s a reason why the restaurant has garnered so many awards. Think yellowfin tuna sashimi with zucchini atchar and pappadum. Coffee-marinated kudu loin with pumpkin labneh and chickpea shoots. Smoked Karoo lamb with samp-and-bean tabbouleh and kapokbos jus. A gingerbread flan dessert drizzled with ideal milk nostalgia.
The thing about Belly is the tasty and super thoughtful food and a tasting menu, but they’re not trying to impress you with gold leaf and truffle shavings. They want to change your mind about the cuts everyone overlooks. Lamb offal slow-cooked overnight into a silky ragu. Beef shin treated with the same reverence as prime fillet.
The formula has worked. Since opening in 2018, Swart and Horn have quietly built a collection on a single stretch of Cape Town’s East City Precinct – Galjoen, Seebamboes, and three more on the way before the year’s end: BURI, Quagga and No Show. Hence the creation of a hospitality group: The Belly Restaurant Group.
BURI will take the juicy boerewors roll into a more upmarket yet relaxed indoor setting, with a focus on quality ingredients. A block away and across the street, Quagga will be the only Cape Town restaurant to focus exclusively on wild game, from venison to wild-caught game fish. And No Show will be the group’s first a la carte restaurant, serving more casual but still “Belly-quality” food for walk-ins only.
As always, it’s about more intimate formats and the new restaurants will have no more than 35 seats each. They’re no known for molecular gastronomy, foams or gels. It’s more about taking good ingredients and unleashing the taste.
