Forget the fluff and fanfare that often comes with fine dining. The partnership that produces these premium plates makes it accessible. Step into COY with Liezl Vermeulen, a dining destination where you’ll find echoes of African flavours.
At first glance, COY looks like a small restaurant, with Table Mountain towering behind it and huge yachts swaying at its feet. The elegant black wooden frame stands at the Cape Town harbour’s edge at the V&A Waterfront. Inside, co-head chefs Geoffrey Abrahams and Teenola Govender-Abrahams (affectionately known as G&T) have curated a taste of the African continent, dishing up premium plates that draw inspiration from the shorelines of our continent.
Two Head Chefs
Teenola tends to answer the questions first – quickly and confidently. Next to her sits her co-head chef (and husband of six months), Geoffrey, who pauses and gives each question the same amount of consideration before answering with carefully chosen words.
This isn’t surprising. When your job is to dish up premium plates in one of Africa’s most visited destinations, the margin for error is small. Their countless days of research, months of curating and planning, and years of industry experience make them keenly connected to their work and confident in their choices. At COY, everything is deeply considered, meticulously tested and planned to a G&T.
Two Stories
Hailing from KZN, Teenola grew up with a Durban-Indian mom who loved to feed people.
“My mom’s a wonderful and instinctual cook,” she says, smiling, while expressing her frustration that there are no written recipes to capture her mother’s cooking. Her mom is adamant that once she’s retired, she’scoming to Cape Town to cook staff lunches at COY. She wants to teach everyone about their culture and how they cook, making it evident that sharing is what underpins her cooking. For Teenola, Monday and Tuesday meant fasting from meat, while Sundays brought big family breakfasts with spicy beans and pork sausages.
Growing up in Cape Town, Geoffrey was part of a busy, creative household where extramurals were king. For his mom, cooking was born out of necessity rather than an affinity for it. (Her creative outlet and career wasmusic rather than cooking.) Now, as an adult, he says he appreciates his mom’s cooking so much more, understands it so much more. “The one thing I’ll never, ever, ever be able to recreate” he says, and Teenola is already nodding in agreement with him, “is her Christmas lunch. No one can touch it, and we don’t try.”
For him, his heritage is more vague, not because it isn’t as distinct and colourful, but because previous generations have been less forthcoming with stories. What he does have are fond memories of big Saturday morning breakfasts and the important Sunday lunches after church that marked the weekly family catch-up.
Today, G&T have blended the two different traditions into their household and their approach to fine dining.
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Words: Liezl Vermeulen
Photography: Zhann Solomons
