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Santie and the steakhouse
S
antie was a lissome blonde with limpid green eyes. A
second year student at Tuks, she was the same age as me
but I, having spent a gap year abroad, was a bit more
worldly-wise, or so I thought.
Our “romance” in the heady Pretoria summer of 1971 was
more given to meaningful staring deep into each other's eyes,
fumbling hand-holding and chaste good-night kisses than it was
to athletic bed-sports. In fact, looking back through the cynical
mist of time I come to realise that perhaps Santie's apparent
interest in me had more to do with improving her (Western
Transvaal farmer's daughter's) English than it did with romantic
plucking at her heartstrings.
And eating. Being a second year student she was perpetually
short of money, and always hungry, and I, though hardly
wealthy at the time, was her meal-ticket.
And thus was I introduced to a Pretoria institution: a steakhouse
in Arcadia named the Taras Bulba.
Newly opened then, the Taras Bulba was the very pinnacle of
chic for young people. Its premises were a pre-war house in
Hamilton Street and its stained-glass front door opened into a
central passage, off which, to left and right, were creaky
wooden-floored rooms filled with tables and chairs.
Efficient waiters stomped about in the smoke-filled, crimson-lit
interior, ferrying large plates of steak and chips and rounds of
drinks to the diners. Steaming slabs of succulent rump and fillet
smothered in monkey-gland sauce on plates piled with chips,
alongside of which came a small square wooden bowl filled
with salad. And the dressing, a mixture of mayonnaise and
vinegar, was provided in a little plastic container which pre-
sented a hazard as one attempted to prise off the lid without
spilling the contents into one's lap, while still maintaining
meaningful eye-contact with the object of one's desires seated
across the small red-checked table.
'Twas at Taras Bulba that Santie introduced me to a cloyingly-
sweet white wine named Delheim Spatzendreck (literally “little
sparrow's shit”), named at a drunken Sunday revelry on the
Delheim estate by a German guest who, upon tasting the
beverage, exclaimed to the winemaker, “Spatz” Sperling,
“Spatz, now this really is dreck.” Sperling, (whose name means
sparrow in German) being a man of some humour, decided to
name the wine Spatzendreck and drove the point home by
commissioning a label which depicted a sparrow with its bum
in the air crapping into a wine barrel.
After the “Summer of '71” Santie and I parted ways and I never
revisited Taras Bulba, although I always noted, on my regular
trips through Pretoria, that the restaurant was still there, its
exterior painted an uninviting avocado green and its front stoep
invariably, in latter years at least, occupied by groups of swarthy
gentlemen from afar who peddle mind-bending substances and
who increasingly make up the residents of Arcadia's flatlands.
By earlier this year, the presence of Nigerian drug-lords having
presumably become too much, Taras Bulba shut up shop in
Hamilton Street and decamped
to leafy Brooklyn, into another
purpose-renovated old house.
And for “oulaas” my beloved-of-
many-summers and I decided to
dine there, joined by one of our
children, a young lad who has
chosen Pretoria as his home and
workplace.
The “new” Taras Bulba is the
same as the old ~ yet different,
and not in a good way. Billing
itself as a Portuguese Steakhouse
its quite limited menu features a
handful of Porra dishes amid a
few old staples such as grilled
steak, soles, calamari etc.
A reminder of how the world, but not the restaurant, has
changed since 1971 was to be seen in the menu. It is common-
place today to have the menu in any “foreign” restaurant in the
language of the restaurant. Thus, in a French establishment for
example, snails on the menu would be described as
“l'escargots”. Not at Taras Bulba: it sticks to the old-fashioned
binary of English and Afrikaans!
The food itself wasn't bad, but there's better to be had half a
mile up the road in Hazelwood. My steak was competently
cooked and the salad ingredients, while fresh, hadn't changed
much in the ensuing 46 years (iceberg lettuce, tomato slices and
onion rings), although gone are the little wooden bowls and
plastic dressing bakkies. The dressing now comes in a squeeze
bottle reminiscent of a Second Class SAR&H dining car of old.
I can't say dining at the “new” Taras Bulba was a perfect trip
down Memory Lane. Rather, it was a reminder that some
things, like old romances, are often better left unrevisited.
WRITTEN BY SMALLHOLDERS, FOR SMALLHOLDERS