The Molten Pot

If there's a place on Earth more multicultural than Cape Town, I have yet to see it.

It's not just white and black, or English and Dutch. In Cape Town, more than in most of South Africa, there are also large Indian, Malay and "coloured" (mixed-race) communities. The people are a fascinating blend of inheritances, and so is the architecture.

There's "Cape Dutch," influenced by the style of Amsterdam but distinctly different:


The English, when they took over in 1806, contributed both stolid neoclassical official buildings and lighter tropical colonial houses:


The Malay neighborhood of Cape Town is marked by mosques as well as a reliance on bright solid colors:



There is also a sizable Jewish community with a large synagogue, which unfortunately I couldn't photograph because it's across the street from a park and the trees prevented getting a good view.

And, as I showed in a previous post, late-20th-century America contributed its architectural ideas as well, in the form of skyscrapers and the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, a sort of South Street Seaport on steroids. (Incidentally, that's Alfred, not Albert; it's not named for Queen Victoria's husband but rather one of her younger sons, whose only importance to history was that he was the only royal of the era actually to visit South Africa.)

The food is similarly multicultural, and marked by the fact that Cape Town was the resupply point for ships headed to Europe from the Spice Islands; apparently casks of spices fell off the backs of the ships while they were in port here with some regularity, because even the Dutch-style stews and cakes are heavily scented with cinnamon, cloves and other spices.

Most "South African" menus include several curries and Indian dishes (especially samosas) along with European-style treatment of game animals like springbok, warthog and wildebeest (they taste, respectively, like venison, pork and buffalo, which oddly enough is also what the live animals look like).

And of course there is the wine, cultivated by French immigrants since the late 1600s, and easily up to the mother country's standards. The best South African wines we had were generally either red Bordeaux blends or Chenin Blancs or Sauvignon Blancs. Names to look for include Grangehurst, Buitenverwachting, Kanonkop, Tokara and Meerlust.