France has always had a particular pulling power for Nataniël, but when his younger brother Erik moved to Nantes in the French countryside, he lost his heart completely.
With the conclusion of his last food series on KYKnet, he decided to team up with Erik, a trained chef, to shoot a specifically French-flavoured affair.
“I think of Nantes as the French Saldanha,” he says. But he was even more intrigued as the original Le Roux (his surname) farm is also in that area. His brother’s wife is also a Le Roux, and her family owns the original farm. That’s where they decided to do the television series, Edik van Nantes. They found an old farm house and stables on the property, so the series is about food as well as renovation.
“I wanted to cook food done by the Huguenots at the time,” he explains. But he didn’t intend going the fine-dining route.
Their kitchen wouldn’t allow extravagance anyway. And once they had to start thinking in South African rands, they also had to plan carefully.
He wanted to explore Nantes, a cultural hub with many universities and artists. “It’s a series as much about lifestyle as food,” he says.
What excited him was the French’s healthy food habits. “We ate huge meals at the end of the day because we were tired, but we lost weight,” he says. He believes it has to do with a lifestyle and a way of thinking about food, which is explored in Edik of Nantes. “Their produce is the best,” he is convinced. Their portions are small and there’s no fuss.
“You don’t hear about gluten-free, sugar-free or dairy-free,” he says.
l Edik van Nantes will be broadcast on KYKnet from October 13 until January.