Fine-dining in Pinetown: It’s all in the timing: Sustainability and care feed into every aspect of the high-end meals at The LivingRoom
restaurant outside Durban share a buzzing symbiotic energy that appears creative and “couple-y” — as if The Clash frontman Joe Strummer had married the group’s lead guitarist, and his most consistent song-writing collaborator, Mick Jones.
Theirs is a duet that translates effortlessly into the LivingRoom, an unpretentious fine-dining restaurant that has put Puntans Hill, the more salubrious part of the otherwise grimy light industrial area of Pinetown to the west of Durban, on the gastronomic map.Johannes is in the kitchen while Johanna works front of house and selects the restaurant’s very thoughtful collection of wines.
“With the sustainability aspect vegetables play the biggest role, you can greenwash beef as much as you like but a kilogram will still have thousands of litres of water and CO2 emissions,” says Johannes. “Sometimes Johanna and I are like: ‘Are we polarising a bit too much here? Is this a little bit too provocative for what we are doing?’ But people come back, so that’s okay.”
Johannes had a “very, very classical French apprenticeship” in Strasbourg at a family run restaurant with a single Michelin star. He says this means his sauces are the foundation of his plates. But he also draws on Japanese techniques such as making shoyu and introduces Durban into this mix of influences, too.