AS Cape Town moves into summer, COY is changing pace. The V&A Waterfront restaurant has introduced its new summer menu, with a lighter, more seafood-led approach across both the seven-course COY Experience and the more relaxed COY EDIT. But the shift is about more than simply swapping heavier dishes for lighter ones. Two years into the restaurant’s journey, the chefs are becoming increasingly confident in the way they explore the ingredients, flavours and cooking traditions of the African continent.
The new menu sees COY lean more decisively into the ocean. Since opening, the restaurant has described its food as an ocean-inspired, seafood-led exploration of Africa and its shorelines. This summer, fish and seafood move even further to the foreground, with the Experience placing greater emphasis on seafood and fewer of the richer, heavier dishes that naturally suit Cape Town’s winter months.
At the same time, the geographical lens is widening. Where recent menus explored flavours and ingredients associated particularly with East Africa, COY is now looking increasingly towards West Africa, including Ghana and Nigeria.
The opening iDombolo snack pairs classic South African steamed bread with chargrilled beef, fermented tomato relish, smoked Stanford Catalan and COY’s own homemade blatjang – a playful nod to the familiar flavours of a braai broodjie.
Bread follows in the form of a 48-hour fermented amadumbe sourdough, now served by the slice with house-made kefir butter, black onion salt and smoked fish-bone jellies. The carcass from the fish used in the following course is smoked and repurposed for the jellies, which recall another familiar South African combination: fish paste and butter on bread.
From there, the menu moves towards the ocean. East Coast squid from Cape St Francis is charred but served cold – something of a leap of faith for the kitchen – with KZN sugarcane and citrus dressing and smoked ayib. Fresh and bright, the dish brings together two ingredients from South Africa’s east coast while setting the tone for the lighter progression that follows.
A hot starter of grilled linefish looks farther north. Merguez sausage, made specifically for COY by Richard Bosman, is rendered down to form the base of a chutney inspired by the flavours of North Africa. Spring peas bring the season back into focus, appearing as a light foam alongside a barley wafer.
The main course of maize-crusted kingklip with Banga bisque, crispy okra and creamy pap takes its inspiration from Banga, the aromatic and flavourful soup eaten in West Africa. At COY, that reference is reworked into a bisque-style sauce – without shellfish – to accompany the kingklip.
The journey continues into the final courses with a Senegalese bay leaf sombi, before the petit fours and cocktail pairing draws inspiration from Ghana. A blood orange and Inzalo agave lolly is accompanied by COY’s homemade amasi and a blood orange and hibiscus fizz. The latter takes its cue from sobolo, the Ghanaian hibiscus drink, reimagined as a naturally carbonated blood orange and hibiscus kefir drink.
What emerges is a menu increasingly comfortable moving between South African memory and a much broader African culinary landscape – without attempting to recreate traditional dishes wholesale.
“We were quite careful in our first year,” explains co-head chef Geoffrey Abrahams. “As we’ve learnt more, met more people and found new ingredients, we’ve become more comfortable exploring further. This menu feels like an evolution of that. We’re looking at different parts of the continent, but we’re also doing more ourselves in the kitchen and understanding those ingredients in a deeper way.”
That growing confidence is evident not only in where the chefs are looking for inspiration, but in what is happening inside the COY kitchen.
The team is making more elements in-house, including its own amasi, while ingredients are being sourced specifically from Ghana and Nigeria for the new menu. It marks an evolution in the way COY engages with the continent: ingredients are not simply references or finishing touches but increasingly become the starting point for how dishes are developed.
It is an approach that reflects COY’s original ambition: not to recreate traditional African dishes, but to explore the ingredients, techniques and culinary histories of the continent through the restaurant’s own cooking.
There is another piece of thinking behind the summer menu – and it has less to do with geography than appetite.
For co-head chefs Teenola Govender and Geoffrey Abrahams, summer presented a practical question: how do you create a generous dining experience without guests reaching the final courses feeling they have had quite enough?
“We realised that people were getting very full towards the end of the Experience,” says Teenola. “They loved the food, but sometimes they simply didn’t have space left to properly enjoy dessert or cheese. We don’t want to solve that by making portions tiny. We want every course to feel generous, but for guests to have the time and appetite to enjoy the whole journey.”
The answer has been to reconsider the rhythm of the menu. The greater emphasis on seafood and fresher dishes allows the Experience to feel lighter without feeling less substantial – leaving guests with both the appetite and attention to enjoy those final courses.
“We don’t want to give people so much that they become overwhelmed and stop remembering what they ate,” says Teenola. “We want each course to have its moment and for guests to finish it properly. It’s about finding that balance – you shouldn’t leave hungry, but you should still want what comes next.”
The same thinking extends to the COY EDIT, the restaurant’s flexible, shareable menu available at both lunch and dinner.
Introduced as a more accessible way to experience COY, the EDIT changes with the season too. For summer, richness gives way to simpler, fresher plates better suited to warm afternoons and long Cape Town evenings. Guests can still build their own meal and find their own rhythm, but the summer EDIT takes its cues from the same lighter thinking as the Experience.
It is a seemingly simple adjustment that says something larger about where COY finds itself today.
Two years in, the restaurant is no longer simply defining what it wants to be. Its chefs are refining how they want people to experience it – exploring further across the continent, working more deeply with the ingredients they discover, and allowing the menu to evolve with both the seasons and the people eating it.
This summer, that means a little more fish, a little less weight, a journey further west – and enough room to enjoy the very last bite.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jan Ras Photography
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