Chef Martha Williams from the 5-star Plettenberg Hotel has been invited to cook at the Cape Malay Food Festival at Vasco’s, Hilton in Abu Dhabi in October. She will present her delicious South African recipes in her unique Cape Malay cooking style.
Every year the Hilton in Abu Dhabi choose the month of October to celebrate International cuisine. They choose a country and invite guest chefs to come and demonstrate their traditional cuisine. This year they choose South Africa, largely because of the amount of South Africans currently working there and also because the current GM of the Hilton, is South African and knows Martha.
During this week she will present a special Cape Malay menu with meals like Bobotie, Tomato Bredie and Masala Fish to name a few. For desert she will present true South African treats like Malva Pudding and koeksisters. Martha will share her stories
and tell visitors more about her love for the Cape Malay cuisine.
Martha got exposure to traditional dishes and ingredients typical of the Cape Malay style – a fusion of spice-rich and fragrant east-Asian cuisines that developed in the kitchens of the Cape during the 17th century – and her innate understanding of flavours and hard work saw Martha being promoted to Head Chef at the hotel’s newly launched Cape Malay restaurant.
International Celebrity Chef’s like our Exec Chef Peter Templehoff, Chef Jan Hendrick and Chef Luke Dale Roberts are doing incredible work promoting traditional Cape Malay cuisine by incorporating dishes into their menu’s and exposing the style of cooking to an International audience, and indeed the country is seen as a food destination because of the influence that Cape Malay food has had on our heritage and style of cooking. To a large extent it is still growing in popularity but with each visitor to our shores they will take back with them fond memories of the countries delights.
A flagbearer for Cape cuisine, she has travelled extensively to represent The Liz McGrath Collection in a variety of destinations, from Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong and Taipei, and now Abu Dhabi.
Her favourite food to prepare is that which reflects her Cape Malay heritage – beloved traditional dishes like bobotie (a baked beef-mince dish using spices and topped with egg), pickled fish (firm white fish typically pickled using curry spices), and seafood potjies (a stew slow-cooked in a special pot over a fire).
