In Cape Town’s inner city, along the Fan Walk on Waterkant Street, Hemelhuijs has been reimagining the idea of a restaurant as a living creative practice for 15 years. This space has been a blank canvas, reshaping itself through colour, texture, flavour, and feeling, guided by the singular vision of its founder, Jacques Erasmus.
Hemelhuijs is built on the idea that creativity is not a moment but a continuum. Interiors are reimagined, sometimes subtly, sometimes with intense dramatic flair over time. Menus respond to season and soil. Objects are chosen, reconsidered, and sometimes returned. Nothing is fixed, yet everything is intentional. The space is Erasmus’s intimate canvas.
Much of what appears on the plate begins far from the city, at Jonkmanshof in Montagu, Erasmus’s country retreat and garden. Here, ingredients are grown with patience and care, shaped by climate and season rather than trend. This relationship with the land anchors the restaurant in something deeply grounded. Food in his kitchen is an expression of respect, not excess.
Family memory runs quietly through everything. Inspired by his mother, Toekie, and his grandmother, Erasmus weaves childhood flavours and domestic rituals into contemporary forms. Dishes such as cabbage-wrapped frikkadelle, mieliepap with salted butter and Karoo honey, or vanilla-baked rhubarb with thyme shortbread carry more than taste. They carry lineage, memory and tenderness. The mosbolletjie bread is a thing of wonder.
Luxury at Hemelhuijs is found in simplicity and attention. Handmade crockery, linen napkins, flowers and music all work together to create an atmosphere that invites presence. It is this quality that keeps guests returning, often to the same table, week after week, year after year. Like me.
To mark its 15th anniversary, Erasmus has released his first book, a deeply personal record of the restaurant’s evolution. The eponymous Hemelhuijs, part cookbook, part visual diary, part reflection, traces the journey of a boy from the Northern Cape who transformed Cape Town’s food landscape by trusting intuition, memory and care. Spanning 14 chapters (with evocative labels such as Orsus, Celebration, Indochine, and Eternity’s Gate) and inspired by experience and ancient history, the book invites readers into the rhythms of his creative life and is displayed in the new store across the street, where all the lovely things Erasmus has cherished and sold over the years are gathered in one glorious emporium.
Hemelhuijs is, above all, a place of quiet regeneration. A reminder that the most enduring creativity is driven not by reinvention but by returning again and again to what matters, and allowing it to grow.
From the February issue of Wanted, 2026
