Supporting the idea Butlers may succeed in a now highly competitive field of perhaps too many restaurants chasing too few customers, many with little discretionary income, is the fact that Pilani Mazadzire owns the gaffe. And he’s a switched-on cookie who doesn’t often chuck loot into gaping holes.
He has Café Espresso in Cork Road which, although never as bursting-at-the-seams-popular as neighbour, 40 Cork Road (“good food, possibly the worst, most unprofessional, service in town!”), has done steady trade for several years and recently took off spectacularly. He also has the coffee shops at Harare’s air terminals: which could be profitable if AirZim flies again!
He has exclusive rights for Lavazza coffee in Central Africa. And that’s Italy’s (and possibly the world’s) preferred gourmet coffee. Pilani makes fine quality teak furniture: used and displayed in his eateries and has an outdoor advertising firm.
Butlers is the operation at ground level at Newlands; above it is an exclusive cocktail, whisky and cigar lounge called…well, why not? The Lounge.I heard rumours around the dorp from several so-called impeccable sources that the upstairs area was to be an ultra-exclusive club with a membership fee of US$10 000.
I even heard the first two members were Philip Chiyangwa, a Comrade who apparently boasts he needs a computer to tell him which of his hundreds of suits to wear with what pair of thousands of shoes and which shirt, tie, belt and cufflinks complete “the look”… and a recently departed general.
Mentioning this whisper to Pilani, he was horrified. “The Lounge isn’t a club, it’s open to the public, there’s no joining fee,” he protested. “Please tell your readers… everyone’s welcome!”
He did say The Lounge wouldn’t serve beer or lager (that’s me out!); it had a fairly strict dress code (ditto!) and was proving so popular tables would only be available on Fridays if pre-booked.
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But, I digress. (As usual!)Pilani was overseas when I went to Butlers, unannounced, for lunch on Tuesday; Russell (who used to meet, greet and sit at the sadly missed Café Med, Borrowdale) was on late shift. They’d both been there when I looked in, en route to Bejazzled, a week earlier.
Eating is indoors or out; it was about two-thirds full, including a largish table of young ladies who lunch languidly. The concept was explained to me.
There’s a mouthwatering array of out-of-the-ordinary (well in Zimbabwe!) salads which include help- yourself roast butternut salads, pecan-and-apple (Waldorf?), sautéed mushroom, pepper and potato, tomato-and-olives and two hard cheeses.
These come with home-baked thyme foccacia with olives and an attractive fruit platter I ignored, assuming it was a pudding. You grab a large (or small) platter of the above to graze with (or before) a choice of three mains: roast topside (not my favourite or the world’s most tender joint) with beef “jus” (gravy); fish pie; roast chicken, fairly unusually with a red wine sauce. Optional starches are aromatic, herb-filled saffron basmati rice or roast potatoes.
My doubts now rose. Set price for the meal is US$20: a bit hefty for workaday Harare, especially when the novelty wears off, as it inevitably will.Salads were scrumptious: flavours melding, vastly different textures somehow blending. The bread was lovely.
I didn’t really need the nice rice with the quite small fish pie, because its main constituent was a bed of creamy mash, into which a few diced vegetables were folded. Fish itself was undistinguished — and to a large extent — undistinguishable from the spuds. Apparently just one type of bland white fish, which may have been bream, or hake.
I’ve obviously been spoiled lately. Last time I had fish pie, my daughter baked it in rural Oxfordshire; it was an exemplar. A week previously — granted in the port of Leith, Edinburgh — a similar dish comprised halibut, cod, skate and hake; smoked haddock, prawns and shrimps gave colour.
Topped with half-a-dozen freshly caught steamed mussels, the dish cost in English (sorry…Scottish) pounds, about the equivalent of US$17 and would have fed two or three.
More doubts rose as I tucked into lunch on the shaded side stoep. My friend Margot, an estate agent, joined me briefly, asking: “Do we need another larney restaurant in this part of town? Don’t you think a good coffee shop would be better?”
She has a point. Trax tried, with varying degrees of success, to be all things to all men (and gals!): they served breakfast and brunch; sandwiches and cake; hot drinks and cold, alcoholic and soft; lunch, tea, supper and cocktails.
It wasn’t just a coffee-and-cocktail outlet proprietor Track Armour ran: but a local meeting place, a true community asset. He supplied stacks of local and overseas newspapers (photocopying crosswords, so everyone could do them!) magazines, books and rolling news channels.
He also ran fun quizzes, wine tasting competitions, cheese and gourmet food sampling and cocktail mixing demonstrations. Seven days a week, it served young and old; black, white, brown and various shades in between from dawn until (often) midnight. I never saw, heard or sensed a row and met some wonderful people (and a few skanky geezers) there.
Candidly, it was that sort of place I hoped Pilani might reprise, leaving the “larney” side to The (lager-free!) Lounge upstairs. Doubts deepened when it came to pudding. I returned to the help-yourself “station” only to recoil in horror that apple or chocolate “tartlets” (note the truly appropriate diminutive: they were rather wee!) cost US$6 each with no mention of cream or ice-cream.
I could have walked across the car-park to TM and bought four of five similar confections for that!
BY DUSTY MILLER
