Here's an article that Victor Strugo Wrote  in the Saturday Star on 1 March 2008 about brunch at roots restaurant.

Homini Crickets by Victor Strugo

When Forum Homini opened near the Cradle of Mankind in 2006, cynics disillusioned with a glut of privately-owned boutique hotel sprouting up in the shrinking green belt between the capital and capitalist cities might well have dismissed it with a Ho Hum. Many other semi-country places had started off with promising intentions before enlisting as mercenaries in the proletarian cash-cow army of JC Le Roux weddings, Don Pedro business conferences and recycled buffets.

Two short years have disproved the critics. Maintaining its declared eco-friendliness and somewhat exclusive prices, the hotel has rapidly topped 70 percent occupancy levels. Hosted weddings drink Laurent Perrier while function rooms attract more board meetings than bored boozing.

To paraphrase a well-known TV commercial, Forum Homini is … a quiet place. Crickets, birdsong and the babbling Honingklipspruit beckons us to forego the DVD player and reflect on mankind’s local origins in a place where architecture, textures and tones pay homage to early hominids, paralleled by a discreet luxury where homo can hold his head erectus.

Fourteen luxurious suites surround the lake (well, large pond), hidden from the main building by highveld vegetation of lowveld luxuriance. But if man is encouraged to commune with nature, the Rousseau philosophy ends at the threshold of the resident restaurant Roots, where Jean-Jacques’ noble savages have evidently been supplanted by kitchen aristocrats.

In the last year, major awards have brought Roots to the attention of city slickers from both Egoli and Tshwane, spurring chef-patron Philippe Wagenführer to entice them with a surfeit of bright new ideas.

What drew me back here were rumours of an enticingly original breakfast menu. Rather than a dawn patrol drive, we braved a 100-minute ordeal in chaotically clogged afternoon traffic to reward ourselves with the calming effect of a night in the country, not to mention the indulgence of a 6-course gourmet dinner.

Well alright I will mention it, briefly. A well-paced succession of six small, imaginative and poetically plated courses, reflecting the chef’s vision of harmonising classical French cooking methods with Asian flavour principles, using high-quality African produce.

Each course is paired with a different selected wine, poured as a 100ml “teaser”. Most of the course-matching was apt, some controversial, all interesting to taste and talk about. With variety instead of volume, tastebud titillation replacing tummy tautness, we left the table satisfied on all levels except the redundant piped music. Contextually, what Roots needs is metaphorical Simon & Garfunkel, i.e., the sound of silence.

Whereas dinner was very much the domain of intimate stay-over couples, breakfast brought in a number of non-residents including a well-behaved family birthday party. What they came for was no traditional continental, English breakfast or self-service buffet. Instead, it is a lighter early-bird application of the tasting menu model, likewise aiming more at pleasure than plenitude.

Between fruit juice and coffee (deliberately served at the end, so as not to jar with the gentler intervening flavours), breakfast’s five courses always start with fruit and end with pastries. Between these, there is cereal, an egg dish and something fishy or meaty (but lightly so). The words hardly sound original: indeed cereal, eggs and kippers seem traditionally British, but like so much innovation, the magic resides in variations on familiar themes.

First, a divine fresh fruit smoothie was paired with chocolate-coated pear, apple and strawberry. The choc-tactics returned with white and dark shards melted with butter over hot maltabella porridge. It’s nice to see this old local favourite revived, and appropriately so since it contains sorghum, which is said to be the first grain milled in ancient Africa.

A poached egg came covered with hollandaise, beside a bacon rosette. Three nice twists: French toast under the egg, balsamic syrup beside the bacon and fragrant green herb oil (coriander, parsley and basil from their garden) as a lighter alternative to Eggs Benedict’s spinach.

Even that was eclipsed by a slab of polenta, beside a delicious medallion of salmon fillet, topped with a substantial prawn. True natural flavours, enhanced with a little chowder sauce and topped with tiny sprouts.

Ensuing croissants, muffins and scones were all miniaturised and home baked, served with a ripe fig jam. A plunger of robust filter coffee arrived now, with enough hot frothed milk to pour a do-it-youccino.

Another novelty: instead of eating first, for meetings of up to 16, they will breakfast in a function room, unobtrusively, such that you experience punctuation without distraction. Hmm, I think I’ll call a Board Meeting.

Address:
Letamo Game Reserve
Bartlett Road
Kromdraai
The Cradle of Humankind
Tel: 011 668-7000
Web: www.forumhomini.com
email:reservations@forumhomini.com

When:
Breakfast, Lunch
& Dinner daily

Seating:
50 inside
20 side room
30 terrace

Cost:
5-course breakfast      R135
Weekend brunch        R175
4-course lunch           R150
6-course dinner          R245
6 wine teasers           R 85
BYO Preferably not

Rating:
Breakfast menu        * * * * ½ [keenly original]
Winelist                        * * * * [versatile selection]
Service                         * * * [very relaxed]
Ambience                    * * * [elegance meets nature]
Value                            * * * * [reasonable in context]