With the dollar holding strong against the South African rand, bargains are everywhere in Cape Town, though it’s not very hard to spend a fortune at the city’s legendarily genteel hotels. In the center of town, the century-old Mount Nelson Hotel is set amid nine acres of lush gardens that are apparently spoon-fed with magic fertilizer; the hibiscus bushes seem to grow to three times their normal size, with four times the blossoms. This year the hotel finally opened a full-fledged spa, the spacious and sun-drenched Librisa, spread throughout three late-Victorian buildings. An even more exclusive lodging option, the 11-room Ellerman House, on a former shipping magnate’s estate on a cliff above Bantry Bay, has a bit of a Monte Carlo flavor, with shiny brass fixtures and obsessively well-tended palm trees. If you have lunch here on the gorgeous terrace, with views of the pool and the Atlantic, don’t fret when you’re not given a menu; the chef will soon appear at your table to tell you what’s fresh and ask how you’d like it prepared.
Many of Cape Town’s best restaurants are in leafy southern suburbs like Constantia (Connecticut meets the Dolomites!), where, at La Colombe, chef Luke Dale-Roberts’s offerings include the most delicately fatty beet tart imaginable. “We love butter here,” explains the waiter as he delivers another unctuous platter: grilled loin of springbok antelope with shimeji mushrooms and panfried foie gras. Food and wine are two things that famously chilled-out Capetonians are unabashedly serious about; at La Colombe, if you order a single glass of wine, the sommelier will likely bring out several options to sample, with a detailed dissertation on each. Even at Salt, a sceney bar-restaurant with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Bantry Bay, a vacuum system protects opened bottles from oxidation so that each of its 75 South African wines is available by the glass.
Travelers coming to Cape Town from elsewhere in southern Africa sometimes declare, a bit sanctimoniously, that the city is too European, too polished, not African enough. Maybe so, but it’s still a place where you can pass a family of wild chacma baboons on the roadside as you head back to your hotel after lunch. Actually, the city’s best attractions are those that combine elements of the civilized and the savage. At the 1,300-acre Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, exquisitely landscaped lawns climb up the eastern slopes of the landmark Table Mountain, an inner-city wilderness where, every year, a few overconfident day hikers take fatal tumbles. Some of Kirstenbosch’s exhibits carry unexpected dashes of dark, self-deprecating humor: Growing in the Garden of Weeds are dozens of native species that have spread from South Africa to inflict damage elsewhere in the world. (One particularly lovely-looking grass, Hyparrhenia hirta, is now ravaging large parts of Australia.)
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