Worth the Hay Fever: Grub & Vine’s Spring Tasting Menu

Playing It Cool? Absolutely Not.

There’s nothing quite like hearing from your crush and pretending you weren’t hoping they’d text. So naturally, I rearranged absolutely “everything”, said yes in what I’d like to believe was a very calm and dignified manner, and arrived the next evening ready to find out exactly what “secret dinner” meant. Spoiler: apparently it meant Chef Aaron had decided to ruin normal dining for me yet again.

Turns out, maybe there is something to this last-minute invitation business. Less waiting. Less anticipation. Less staring at the calendar willing Friday to hurry up. Cape Town had spent the day before behaving completely unhinged, with wind strong enough to turn simply walking down the street into an extreme sport. If you were one of the unfortunate souls physically rearranged by a gust, I’m sorry.

Elevated, Never Stiff

I walked in grinning from ear to ear. Grub & Vine manages something I really love. It feels elevated without ever feeling stiff. Elegant, yes, but warm. You don’t walk in feeling like you suddenly need to remember which fork is legally yours. And, as if I wasn’t already pleased enough with myself for accepting that DM, Chef Matt Manning was in the building too. Big fat hug for Matt. Meanwhile, Chef Aaron was exactly where I expected him to be: head down in the open kitchen, very busy turning ingredients into things I would shortly become emotionally attached to.

Where the Kitchen Has Nowhere to Hide

I’ve said it before, but I love that open kitchen. There’s nowhere for the energy of a restaurant to hide. You can see the pace, the concentration, the communication, the tiny moving parts that have to come together before anything reaches your table. And what struck me again was the team. There was this lovely rhythm to everything. Aaron leading, the team moving around one another, people smiling, each person clearly having their part to play. You can tell when a team is simply working in the same kitchen, and you can tell when they’re working together.

Classics Go In. Aaron Things Come Out.

What I love about Chef Aaron’s cooking is that he doesn’t seem interested in making food complicated just for the sake of proving that he can. He starts with flavours you recognise, respects the thing that made them good in the first place, and then somehow pulls them apart, pushes them around the flavour spectrum, adds contrast, texture, acidity, richness, temperature… and hands them back to you looking completely different but still making perfect sense. Basically, classics go into the kitchen. Aaron things come out. It is a great honour to be one of his guinea pigs.

Tiny Bites, Alarmingly High Standards

Still happily sipping away at my bubbles, I seemed to have manifested food into existence, because two canapes suddenly appeared in front of me. And if there is one thing Grub & Vine refuses to do, it is treat anything as an afterthought. Not the wine. Not the garnish. Not even the little bite you eat before the actual menu has technically begun.

These two little things set the bar alarmingly high. Give me the weird combination. Give me the thing that makes absolutely no sense on paper. Those are normally the bites I want to understand most.

Meat Pie Meets Sweet Pie

First up was venison tartare, miso mousse, blueberry and shortbread. Now explain to me why venison belongs on a buttery shortbread biscuit with blueberry. Actually, don’t. It just does. Shortbread and blueberry? My brain immediately goes dessert. Add venison and suddenly it’s meat pie meets sweet pie... dinner and dessert have decided they no longer need separate courses. The shortbread was buttery, the venison soft, the miso mousse adding that deeper savoury note, and then the blueberry came through with just enough sweetness and tartness to lift everything back up again. It was one of those bites where everything seems to soften and melt together as you eat it. And importantly, it was one bite. Exactly as it should be.

There’s a lot happening there, so you don’t need half a plate of it. You need one perfect little mouthful, followed immediately by a sip of cold bubbles to cut through all that buttery savouriness and reset the palate. Very civilised behaviour from me so far.

Culinary Christmas

What made the whole thing even more fun was that I had absolutely no idea what was coming next. They know I love food far too much, so nothing was explained to me beforehand. No studying the menu. No deciding what I thought I’d like best. Plate arrives. Surprise! For someone as nosy about food as I am, that is basically culinary Christmas.

Two canapes down, absolutely no clue what Chef Aaron was sending out next, and already I had a feeling this was going to be a very, very good evening.

When Wine Changes the Punctuation

Apparently being fed wasn’t enough. I was also assigned a sommelier for the evening, which meant every course came with its own wine pairing. This is where a tasting menu gets properly interesting for me. The wine wasn’t there as a separate performance alongside dinner; it changed the shape of the food. Acidity sharpened or softened, richness suddenly had somewhere to go, and flavours that already worked began behaving differently together. The pairing became part of the course.

Soup Is No Longer Allowed to Simply Be Soup

And what came next was, quite frankly, ridiculous. Chilled pea soup, Parmesan ice cream, ajo blanco and ham bruschetta. Yes. Parmesan. Ice. Cream. I should have known the soup would cause problems because the last time I ate at Grub & Vine, the soup was one of the dishes I couldn’t stop talking about afterwards. Apparently Chef Aaron has decided soup is no longer allowed to simply be soup. The chilled pea base was silky, intensely green and tasted unmistakably of spring. There were little pops of fresh pea throughout, a slick of oil over the top adding even more lusciousness, and sitting proudly in the middle was that scoop of Parmesan ice cream.

Wildly Different Tax Bracket

This is where my brain went straight back to childhood. Remember when you’d get a bowl of ice cream and aggressively stir it until it became this thick little ice-cream soup? Same sensory satisfaction, wildly different tax bracket. As the Parmesan ice cream softened into the chilled pea soup, everything became creamier and more savoury, but the ice cream itself still had this fine-grained texture that stopped the whole bowl becoming one-note. Sweet pea, salty Parmesan, cool against cool, silky against textured. Umami had entered the chat.

Naturally, I Dipped It

Because apparently we still needed more texture, the ham bruschetta came alongside, topped with Parmesan and little green pea moments of its own. Crisp bread, salty smoky ham, fresh pea, sharp cheese. I was presumably supposed to eat it elegantly alongside the soup. Naturally, I dipped it. And that was it for me. The soup didn’t need the bruschetta, which is almost what made it better. It was already exceptional on its own; the crunchy, salty bite simply gave you somewhere else to go before coming back for another spoonful. Add a sip of that rounded white wine between the two and suddenly the whole thing reset and started again. It is now days later and I am still thinking about a bowl of soup. Do you understand the severity of the situation? I would go back for that course alone.

Spring Starts Showing Off

Next course. Next praise. Enter: yellowtail rillettes, tomato gazpacho, herb bavarois and rye bread. Before I even tasted it, the smell got me. Bright, tomato-heavy, almost mouth-wateringly sharp. You know when something smells so fresh and acidic that your mouth starts reacting before you’ve even picked up the fork? That. And visually, this was spring showing off. My algorithm has decided I need to spend half my life watching Europeans romanticise tomatoes: sliced onto plates, rubbed onto bread, drowned in olive oil, treated with the kind of reverence normally reserved for fine jewellery. I am completely here for it. We don’t always celebrate tomatoes quite like that here, and this was one of the first local dishes to give me the same feeling.

Simplicity Isn’t Boring. It’s Confidence.

The gazpacho was proudly, properly tomato. Fresh, punchy, acidic, with those beautiful little tomato pieces scattered through it. And suddenly I understood the appeal of gazpacho all over again. When the produce is good enough, simplicity isn’t boring. It’s confidence. But, obviously, this was Grub & Vine, so the gazpacho was merely the stage.

Perched on top was rye bread with the yellowtail rillettes and herb bavarois, and immediately my brain travelled north. There was something very Nordic about it, almost a little nod to Danish smørrebrød, with that dark, sturdy rye carrying something creamy and fish-forward on top. Except here we’d somehow travelled from Spain to Scandinavia while still eating South African yellowtail and seasonal local produce. Passport stamps via palate. I approve.

A Little Spain. A Little Scandinavia. Very Much Cape Town.

The pairing leaned round rather than razor-sharp, which was smart beside all that tomato acidity. Instead of piling acid onto acid, it softened the edges and gave the creamy yellowtail and rye more room to show themselves. That’s what I love about a properly considered pairing: the wine doesn’t just sit beside the food, it changes the punctuation. A little Spain. A little Scandinavia. Very much Cape Town. Somehow, Chef Aaron made it all make sense.

And Just Like That, We Hit ‘The Middle’

And just like that, we reached the middle. Literally. That’s what the menu calls it. And it felt like the exact point where the meal turned a corner. We’d gone from buttery little canapes to bright pea, then sharp, tomato-heavy acidity, and now suddenly we were moving into something deeper, warmer and more savoury. This is also where I started really appreciating the pacing of the menu.

As the flavours became richer, the portions became more restrained. Nothing was trying to flatten you halfway through dinner. You got enough to understand the plate, enough to want another bite, and then it moved on. That balance matters in a tasting menu; beautiful courses can very quickly become increasingly difficult obligations if nobody knows when to stop. Thankfully, Chef Aaron does.

Surf and Turf Goes to Finishing School

Confit salmon, braised oxtail, fennel a la grecque and mussel curry nage. Basically, surf and turf had gone to finishing school. The confit salmon barely needed convincing to flake, soft and almost buttery without tipping into oily. Sitting on top was braised oxtail, deeply savoury and properly meaty, bringing an entirely different kind of richness. Fish and oxtail together sounds like one of those combinations you might raise an eyebrow at on paper. On the plate? Completely logical.

The fennel a la grecque brought this gentle sweetness, and the mussel curry nage was fragrant and lightly spiced, with just enough salinity to keep us firmly in seafood territory. Plump. Briny. Little bursts of the sea sitting right on top of all that slow-cooked meat and silky salmon. It was rich, yes, but not clumsy. Comforting, but still elegant. Familiar enough that your brain recognises the building blocks, yet arranged in a way I’d never actually eaten before. Old and new. Surf and turf. Comfort food with a very expensive education.

The pairing knew better than to try to outmuscle a plate already carrying this much bass. It kept enough freshness in the conversation to meet the mussel nage without fighting the oxtail.

Apparently I Eat Pork Now

By this point, it was clear the menu wasn’t just a collection of good plates. It had a rhythm. Light, rich, bright, deep. And Chef Aaron was very deliberately walking us through it. The pork came next. Now, I need to explain something before we proceed. I don’t generally order pork. There is no dramatic childhood trauma attached to this decision. It’s simply never really been my meat of choice. Put it into a good pork banger and suddenly we can talk, but given an entire menu of options, pork loin is very rarely where my finger lands. Which makes what happened next particularly inconvenient for my personality.

Pork loin, buttered cabbage, crispy pork belly, turnip remoulade and cider sauce. And yes, I saw the pink. My brain clocked it too. There was a brief, irrational little well, Paige… before common sense returned: this had arrived exactly as the kitchen intended. Thank goodness I behaved, because this was one of the best things I ate all night.

Pork Loin Should Not Feel Like Homework

The pork itself was unbelievably tender. Properly, ridiculously tender. The kind you could almost cut with the side of a spoon, with none of that dry, fibrous quality that can make pork loin feel like homework. Then underneath was that glossy cider sauce, rich and savoury but with enough sweetness and acidity running through it to stop the meat becoming heavy. The buttered cabbage added softness and a sweetness of its own, while the turnip remoulade brought this cool little contrast alongside everything warm and deeply savoury.

Chef Aaron: 1. My Preconceived Opinions: 0.

But apparently Chef Aaron wasn’t finished proving me wrong. Because then there was the crispy pork belly. Another thing I ordinarily wouldn’t choose. I know. At this point, why was I even invited? I’ve just never been particularly drawn to very fatty cuts of meat, and pork belly often falls squarely into that category for me. But I am a grown woman. I can admit when I am wrong. And I was wrong. That little piece was sticky, deeply caramelised and almost glazed, with this gorgeous sweet-salty-umami thing happening beneath a crisp dusting.

Rich, yes, but the portion kept it disciplined. That tiny, concentrated piece of pork belly landed like an exclamation mark rather than a full stop. It came with a lighter red rather than anything huge or aggressively tannic, which made perfect sense: enough body for the caramelisation, enough restraint not to flatten the loin or bury the cider sauce. Apparently I now eat pork. Chef Aaron: 1. My preconceived opinions: 0.”

Technically Parmesan Polenta. Emotionally? Cheesy Pap.

Which brings us to the final savoury course. Enter: braised lamb flank, basil emulsion, ratatouille, Parmesan polenta and green olive jus. Or, as I announced three seconds after tasting it: “Oh! This is really good cheesy pap.” I am nothing if not sophisticated. Technically, Parmesan polenta. Emotionally? Cheesy pap. And actually, that little moment made me love the idea of the dish even more. We’d spent the evening travelling all over the place through flavour, technique and inspiration, but there was something about ending the savoury portion with lamb and maize that felt wonderfully familiar. A little nod back home.

Tendernism Strikes Again

The lamb itself was slow-cooked into submission. Touch it with a fork and it basically surrendered, pulling apart into soft strands. Hashtag tendernism strikes again. This was the deepest point of the evening. The Parmesan polenta was creamy, salty and deeply savoury, the lamb added weight, and that glossy green olive jus underneath intensified everything further. Which is where the greener, brighter elements really mattered. The basil emulsion brought that fresh herbaceous lift, while the ratatouille brought sweetness and acidity amongst all that meat, cheese and jus.

The Main of Mains

Nothing was pretending this was a light dish. It wasn’t supposed to be. It was the main of mains. And crucially, it wasn’t enormous. Any more and I think the richness could have started winning the fight. At exactly that size, it felt like where the savoury progression had been heading all along: the deepest plate of the evening, arriving just before the menu changed direction completely. The red had enough body for the lamb, Parmesan polenta and olive jus, but thankfully it wasn’t an aggressive red. With a dish this rich, the wine didn’t need to arrive wearing shoulder pads. It just needed enough structure to sit alongside everything without making the whole course feel heavier.

Goodbyes Are Hard. Dessert Wine Helps.

And then it was time for the sweet ending. My sommelier appeared for the final time. I know. Goodbyes are hard for me too. Thankfully, this one came with dessert wine. And I am an absolute sucker for dessert wine. Give me that golden, syrupy, concentrated little pour and suddenly I’m remarkably good at coping with loss. There was something rather perfect about it, actually. My evening had begun with cold bubbles in a flute and was now ending with something sweet in a tiny little stem. Full circle. Just significantly happier.

Structural Engineering Not Required

I put my spoon through the centre and genuinely looked up with my mouth hanging open. There was almost no resistance. The shell gave this delicate little crack and then the spoon just sank through into this incredibly soft centre. Not dry, not chalky, not one enormous lump of meringue that requires structural engineering to eat. Delicate outside, soft and almost cloud-like within, with all those creamy and fruity layers hiding underneath. And suddenly I understood why this had been chosen to finish the menu. After everything we’d just eaten, we didn’t need another enormous, rich dessert arriving to finish us off. We needed this.

Strawberry sweetness, tangy yoghurt, silky crème diplomat and nutty almond praline, with enough fruit acidity to keep pulling everything back from cloying. And underneath it all was that gorgeous pool of strawberry, giving every spoonful this juicy, almost syrupy finish. It tasted indulgent without feeling heavy.

Which, coming from someone who ordinarily sees the words “light dessert” and immediately starts looking for the chocolate option, is high praise indeed. But perhaps that’s spring. And with strawberry appearing at the very end, it almost felt as though spring had given us the tiniest glimpse of what was waiting on the other side.

Summer, loading…

Talent Without the Performance

Chef Aaron doesn’t need to sell you on his talent. By this point, the plates have already done that. He’s incredibly talented, yes, but there is a gentleness to him too. A genuine curiosity. He came back after dinner and actually wanted to know what we thought. Not the ceremonial “everything good?” you sometimes get as somebody is already walking away. He wanted feedback. He cares. And that same warmth extends beyond the kitchen. Our sommelier had quietly guided us through the entire evening, appearing with every glass, letting each pairing become part of the course rather than some separate wine lecture happening alongside dinner.

Elevated, But Never Cold

That’s the thing about Grub & Vine. It is elevated, but it is never cold. Somehow, every time I walk through those doors, it feels a little less like visiting a restaurant and a little more like visiting people I genuinely adore. And apparently those people know me far too well. Because just when I thought the evening was officially over, Chef looked at me and said: “I’ve got one last surprise for you.” Excuse me? He disappeared and came back with a slice of Beef Wellington for me to take home. The same Beef Wellington I’d been completely obsessed with on my previous visit. If remembering what somebody loved and sending them home with a little piece of it isn’t hospitality, I genuinely don’t know what is.

And Somehow, Spring Won

And there I was. New month. New season. New menu. And once again, Chef Aaron had taken me somewhere. Not geographically, although at various points my palate had apparently visited half of Europe and returned to South Africa for cheesy pap. But through spring. Bright. Green. Fresh. Acidic. Creamy. Deep. Rich. And finally, sweet. There was a progression to this menu that I appreciated even more once I reached the end. Nothing felt like a stack of dishes that happened to be served consecutively. One course made sense because of what came before it, and the next made sense because of where we were going.

You Can Try.

So yes, I know I keep talking about Chef Aaron. I know. At the moment, he’s probably my favourite chef on the scene, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. You can try. But when someone is doing work this exciting, I’m going to keep talking. It’s not only the technical ability or the food coming out of that kitchen; it’s the passion, humility and team behind all of it. And if this is what Chef Aaron and his team think spring tastes like? I’ll happily suffer the hay fever.

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