The Fat Frog Kitchen
Where:
384 Lilian Ngoyi Road, Morningside
Open:
Monday to Friday 7am to 4.30pm
Call:
082 923 8328
The hard lockdown has devastated Durban’s restaurants, but it’s also tough on their customers who liked to eat out to enjoy the spice they added to life.
Not only did the social side of dining evaporate into thin air, but if we wanted interesting flavours and great meals, we had to prepare them ourselves.
Added to this, somewhere in the early days of lockdown someone developed a pathological aversion to cooked chicken. It was almost as if this tasty but humble and versatile protein was a vector carrying the virus itself.
Then there was the problem of same old, same old. Do I really want to eat the same meal for three days? So it was a relief when restaurants could at least open on level 4. Obviously it’s not the same, but you could still enjoy a good meal, and importantly, get a wonderful variety of flavours.
One such outlet that has been a lifesaver supplying healthy, varied and comforting meals is the Fat Frog Kitchen. Before the lockdown it was a charming bakery and coffee shop which produced excellent home meals. Now, owners Claire Allan and Jenny Clarke have ramped up the home meal side, delivering in the area, or are open for collection.
All meals are frozen. You order from a changing weekly menu of eight to 10 items on a Monday and collect on a Friday. They come in portions from single to two or four.
And while you can’t enjoy relaxing on the pavement with excellent coffee and an old-fashioned cheese and tomato toastie , Allan and Clarke still serve everything with their natural charm.
To date I’ve relished their oxtail, a deeply flavoured, slow-cooked casserole with the meat falling off the bone, that would have taken me hours to make. The Persian lamb cooked with dates was a superb and unusual dish.
The butter chicken, while not the hottest number out there, still had beautiful flavour. I mopped it up with a couple of rotis.
The simply named “Claire’s beef dish” was a pot roast beef in a bourguignon-style sauce with whole baby onions, packing a lovely flavour punch. The hearty beef stew too was everything like the version I remember gran used to make. And the chicken and leek pie just needs 10 to 15 minutes in the oven to cook the phyllo pastry top to a golden crisp. It was great to taste a dish where the flavour of the leeks actually came through.
I’ve also enjoyed their soups, with different offerings every week. The smoky pea and ham soup was a great pick-me-up for a quick lunch in the last cold
snap.
Other options might include delicious pork and venison meatballs in an Italian tomato sauce, or a beef curry that is strongly aromatic rather than fiery hot. There are at least two or three meal options each week for vegetarians.
The baking is available, with moist carrot cake and their famed mini beesting cakes. I usually get a packet of the health rusks for sustenance in the office in the late afternoon. I’m told the fudge rusks are decadent, although that sounds a little too sweet for me.
Food:
Homely flavours
Service:
Homely charm
Ambience:
Homely comfort