Joop’s Place
Where: 14, Avonmore Centre, Ninth Avenue, Berea
Open: Tuesday to Thursday and Saturday 5pm to 10pm, Friday noon to 10pm, Sunday noon to 5pm.
Call: 082 551 7199
I don’t often order a steak when eating out. It is, after all, something I can easily do at home myself. Rub it in a little olive oil, a sprinkle of salt and pepper, three minutes a side under the grill, let it rest for five minutes and Voilà!, it’s on the plate.
But I felt like a steak and didn’t feel like making a pepper sauce, so on a lonely Tuesday night, I popped into Joop’s Place. It was packed. They found a home for me at the bar in the new wine bar next door. The 200g fillet (R200) was a good cut, cooked to a perfect medium rare. The pepper sauce was rich and creamy and had a great bite. The chips were decent. It hit the sweet spot.
I suggested a visit to the Glass Guy, before his disappearance on a Thai holiday. On a Saturday night they were fully booked and it was suggested that if we came in at about 8.30 and waited at the bar, a table would become available. But about half an hour later I got a call: there was a cancellation and we were welcome.
We arrive at a buzzing restaurant, tables spilling out onto the verandah. There are couples on date nights, families, groups of friends. Across from us is a long table where a well-fed beefy family has decamped. They’re here for a real meat treat.
We soon have the wine poured. I’m impressed at the reasonable wine mark-ups.
Joops have a T-bone challenge (R580) ‒ a 2.2kg hunk of meat with sides. It’s designed for two to share, but, if you’re brave enough to tackle it on your own, you get the T-shirt. We even contemplated it ‒ sharing it, that is ‒ but baulked at the idea of so much meat. Besides, our waiter said they were out of stock ‒ the beefy table had ordered every cut of T-bone they had left. Wow. The difficulty was not so much serving the giant slabs of meat, but finding a T-shirt in size 5XL.
Joops beef burger is a 350g home-made patty. I contemplated it ‒ just to see what it looked like even though I knew I could eat only half of it. The Shark Tank Legend burger not only includes the 350g patty, but a piece of sirloin steak as well, all smothered in a creamy cheese sauce. There should be a T-shirt for that too.
We would be way more modest.
Starters include the likes of crumbed prawns or calamari or roquefort snails or chilli chicken livers. Their jalapeno poppers have biltong mixed in with the cream cheese. We try the cheesy garlic roll (R40) and a plate of peppered boerewors (R70). This was good and came with a tomato sauce spiked with cumin. The wors was juicy. The roll was heavy with garlic and laden with cheese. It was a bit doughy but with all that topping was never going to be crisp. It scooped up the wors nicely.
There are chicken schnitzels and a flattie and hake and chips and a couple of salads, but the vast bulk of the menu features meat on the grill. The lamb shank with braised onions on mash tempted, as did the pork spare ribs. And then there are steaks ‒ with chilli, or cheese, or garlic, or pepper or even surf and turf.
I enjoyed the garlic biefstuk (R240), a 300g pan-fried fillet in garlic and flamed in brandy. More good chips here. The Glass Guy raved about the Karoo lamb loin chops (R250), three thick meaty chops (400g) cooked to a perfect medium rare and basted simply in olive oil and seasoning. He also enjoyed the roasted veg, a generous side with an interesting array of roasted veg.
We ordered more wine as we watched the red meat clan chomping through mountains of vleis. And, yes, they did it. The doggy bag was a genuine one ‒ all the bones and stuff for probably a fairly beefy dog.
Food: 4
Service: 3 ½
Ambience: 3 ½
The Bill: R854, excluding tip.
The Independent on Saturday