Last Saturday, my husband, daughter & I met my parents for lunch at the well known restaurant 'The Meat Company', which is situated at the Monte Casino complex (which I wrote a blog post about during a previous visit to South Africa last year, which you can read over here). The restaurant, as you can tell by it's name, is known for the various cuts of top quality meat which it serves (along with seafood !) The photo above shows the interior of the upper dining level - which is reached via a staircase of wine !
The photo above shows the exterior of the restaurant, as it is inside an enclosed 'fake' Italian styled village, it is permanently 'night time' here !
As seen in the above photo, the view from the upper dining area of the restaurant allows you to look down on the 'village streets' below !
The staircase leading from the lower to the upper dining levels, is made up of thousands of bottles of wine. It was a pretty steep, spiral staircase to negotiate for me at almost 9 months pregnant, but as I said to my family - I had to take photo's of it from the top, for all my blog readers to see !
The restaurant is a popular local & international celebrity hangout apparently, and each time a celebrity eats there they are asked to autograph a dinner plate & write a message on the plate - the plates are then displayed around the restaurant (you can make some out amongst the wine bottles in the photo above). Some of the plates I saw had been signed by both local & international Sports teams/athletes, actors and actresses, TV presenters, 'Big Brother' contestants, musicians and bands to mention but a few.
South Africa is known for the wonderful wine which she produces, and here above is a wine display showing a small selection of what the restaurant offers to diners.Since living in Tanzania (where the general quality of meat is not that great) I have gone off meat - red meat especially - and prefer to eat chicken or vegetarian options, but my husband is a complete carnivore so this restaurant was right up his street ! He tucked into a 1/2 kg (1 lb) rump steak and my Dad enjoyed the same ! My Mum enjoyed a ladies rump, and I opted for the Thai chicken wings, which my daughter also enjoyed. The flavour and tenderness of the meat was, according to all those who ate it, exceptional - and the restaurant certainly live up to their slogan 'steaks you'll leave home for !'
If you'd like to read more about 'The Meat Company' group of restaurants - which also operate in Australia, Bahrain, the Middle East, Mozambique, Israel, United Kingdom & Asia you can read more about them over here.
