Middle Eastern Karoo

Adrienne Southey is a farm-based classically trained chef with an international take on the best of Heartland food.

- Julienne Du Toit

When Adrienne Southey was a tot growing up on Hillston Farm between Middelburg and Steynsburg in the Eastern Cape Karoo, she used to have a play-play restaurant under the pepper trees.

She arranged chairs around an old wooden table and invented starters, mains and desserts for her dollies, teddies and somewhat less than willing siblings.

Now here we are with Adrienne decades later, sitting on garden chairs at the very same table, under the old pepper trees around the homestead, photographing and devouring her courgette fritters. And we are far happier to partake than her childhood teddies ever were.

Adrienne has just returned from catering for 140 well-satisfied guests at a wedding on a nearby farm. If she’s not cooking or taking pictures – usually of food or Karoo landscapes – she’s sketching in ink or pencil, or shooting videos for weddings.

“And creating meals for visitors,” she tells me. “Or plotting how to restore derelict farm buildings here and do them up as guest accommodation.” She did this with an abandoned old house called Northmead, five gates and two valleys away. “They used it as a set for a movie called Stuur Groete aan Mannetjies Roux,” says Adrienne. “With the money I earned from catering for the film crew I bought a set of fantastic cooking pots.”

Adrienne’s childhood dreams of working in a restaurant have been fulfilled several times over. “I’m happy just as long as I’m doing something creative,” she says. She was classically trained at Silwood Kitchen in Cape Town and then employed by restaurants like La Colombe, the Old Mutual Executive Kitchen and Ellerman House. She also explored food product development for Pick ’n Pay and was a food stylist for a major woman’s magazine.