CAPE CLASSICS REVISITED: Nelson’s Eye and Magica Roma, still among the Cape’s best

Some things should never change. Nelson’s Eye, whose title of best steakhouse at the Cape is uncontested by all except those who don’t know any better, is the best example of this. And over in Pinelands, Magica Roma, much younger after opening in the late 1980s, shines as brightly as ever.

The same waiter who served us back in the Noughties was at our table again, just weeks ago. The same table we’d been seated at in 2012, or maybe 2013. Stray lines now punctuate his cheeks, but other than that it was as if we’d climbed in a time machine and out again, 14 years later, and he was just as we’d left him.

Nelson’s Eye owner Steven Albert has aged a soupçon more than his prized waiter. Like a prime sirloin that has been allowed the time to reach its peak of ripeness. A twinkle in the eye, a memory like an ox. “You sat there last time you were here,” he said. And we did.

The Nelson’s Eye website claims that it is the best steakhouse in Cape Town. And nobody with any sense is arguing. I must have first come here in the 1970s, though it had already been operating since the early 1960s. Throughout the Eighties we’d pop in now and then, and more often in the 1990s when I was all over town writing about restaurants for Top of the Times in the Cape Times.

Off we went to live in England and when we returned, yes, it was still going. We moved to Sutherland and, two years later, we were booking a table at Steve’s restaurant again. And now, after 11 years in Cradock, we’re back. And Steve and his effortlessly superb steakhouse are still there.

Nobody has had the idiocy of tampering with the decor, with the space, the room. It is as it always was. And why should it change? I fear the day someone else gets their hands on it, looks around and says, “Urgh! This is way too old-school! Everything must go. Gut the place.”

And we know that there are a lot of people who would do that. Often the next generation. There are wonderful exceptions to this – like the next Hussar Grill generation, who fashioned a way to replicate the original Rondebosch steakhouse all over the country while retaining its essence in decor and ethos.

Let us keep something of the old ways, some reminders of kinder, less-venal times. Every corner at Nelson’s Eye, every picture on every wall, suggests older ways of doing things. Must it all go, only to be imagined with doleful eyes by those with long memories? Until they’re all gone, and nobody is left even to describe what once was?

I remember going straight to the counter and eyeing the cuts of beef, so many times. Choosing your preference while as