29/07/2026
Last week we joined Food Indaba to talk about water and the food system - from the perspective of a twenty-seat restaurant on the West Coast.
It began with cold water - the Benguela current, which runs up this coast from the Southern Ocean and informs everything Wolfgat serves.
We cook what the sea delivers and what the boats bring in - no order sheet. Cultivated mussels and oysters, limpet and white mussels from Paternoster bay, fish from small-scale suppliers. When the south-easter blows for days, or an algal bloom affects the bay, the menu changes with it.
But coastal foraging, cooking to the day's catch, and collecting food from the veld, are not contemporary restaurant ideas. These are the oldest food practices on this coast, and have never stopped.
A restaurant that depends on a water system inherits that system's limits: cultivated abalone left our menu when a farm up the road closed, undone by a market on the other side of the world. Other species are under immense pressure too, from environmental and socio-economic change.
Then there is the other water system - the one we don't have. Paternoster is semi-arid: rain from maybe June to August, then essentially none. It sets the foraging calendar and shapes our pantry. Preservation here is a water-saving technology, not nostalgia.
Most of what Wolfgat knows about this coast was known in Paternoster long before we opened - and that knowledge lives in our team, who grew up on this shoreline and have watched it change in their own lifetimes.
* * *
20 seats. A team of 7. One restaurant, built to fit a landscape.
This model doesn't scale, and that's the point.
Photography by Jac de Villiers and Kobus van der Merwe
