Mosaic Restaurant: How the Other Half Lives

After last week's slumming it in the Bushveld Pub, I decided to see how the other half lives. Pah to plastic tot glasses, sticky table tops and pies. Bring me slivers of haute cuisine with portions artfully laid out like edible origami. Proffer exorbitantly priced smears of exotic food so thin they're hard to discern from the lacquered plate decoration, and cost more than your daughter's orthodonture.

Mosaic Restaurant is about 1 hour away from Jo'burg. It's a stucco Moorish-themed pile, complete with minarets and balconies- plonked in the 3-day beard stubble vegetation of the highveld- a surreal juxtaposition worthy of Ren� Magritte. With its Post-Impressionist artworks, gilded statues, and marbled columns, Mosaic looks like a gold-plated explosion in Wombles restaurant in Parktown North.
Prepared by one of the top five SA chefs, just reading the menu's a mouthful: Foie gras, Quail Pithiviers, Poached Golden Russet Pear Tarte Tartin with Ruby Port Sorbet. We chose the set Grande D�gustation Menu, a seven course kaleidoscope of flavours, sights, and aromas that made my overworked tastebuds reel like a chameleon on a Persian carpet, under flashing disco lights.

Their wine collection won Sun international wine list off the year 2009. We ploughed through several bottles of haughty, fabulously loftily-named wines that wouldn't let a d�class� bottle of Tassies anywhere near their daughters.
All in all, after a long-ish drive, Mosaic is an oasis of gilded luxury, and something to definitely try once. Once. Just try not to think about the fact that you could have about 30 meals at the Zoo Lake Bowling Club for the same price, and still have change for a bottle of Tasssies.

Mosaic Restaurant
Elandsfontein
Crocodile River Valley
Pretoria
012 371 2902
http://www.restaurantmosaic.com

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What Others Said

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Natalie said
on 09 October 2009

How can you support a restaurant that serves Foie gras?