It takes a special kind of confidence and talent to work alongside Luke Dale-Roberts — one of South Africa’s greatest chefs — and still shine.
For years, Carla Schulze worked quietly and devotedly in his orbit, first as a junior at The Test Kitchen, then rising steadily until she became head chef at Salon, which, in a relatively short time, has become one of Cape Town’s most celebrated restaurants.
At the annual LUXE Restaurant Awards last month, Schulze walked away with the title of Top Chef in the country, while Salon took home a LUXE Three Star Award. And her street food venture, How Bao Now (which she started with a friend and fellow chef), was named Best Street Food. It was, by any measure, a remarkable night for her.
“I took it as a moment to really enjoy it,” she says. “To celebrate it, to soak it all up.”
That she achieved all of this without ever leaving the fold of one employer makes her story all the more compelling. Schulze has only ever worked for Dale Roberts. It didn’t happen by accident; it was entirely intentional.
More than a decade ago she had been on the cusp of heading to Switzerland to study hotel management until she noticed something telling about her own deliberations: she kept evaluating programmes based on the length of their culinary component. The signal was clear — that’s where her interest lies. She enrolled at the Jackie Cameron Culinary School instead.
She arrived at The Test Kitchen a decade ago and hasn’t looked back. What she found in Dale Roberts was more than a mentor. At the time, he was lauded as the top chef, not just in South Africa but on the continent, and for Schulze, who describes herself as someone who never did particularly well at school, his kitchen was a revelation. “I was just obsessed with it. I absolutely loved it.”
What began as a discipleship has evolved into a genuine creative partnership. The restaurant’s tasting menu, The Journey, which was once called the Explorer menu, was historically Dale Roberts’ domain: his influences, his history, and his experiences shaped every dish. Now, it belongs to both of them. “It’s now a menu by Luke and Carla,” she says. “And I think I’ve put in a lot of influence.”
The collaboration is constant and dynamic. “We’re constantly challenging each other on how to be better and what we can do [to] keep growing. And I think he trusts me.”
Trust extends not just upward to Dale Roberts but downward through her kitchen. She speaks with pride about the culture cultivated at Salon — one that focuses on staff well-being and invests in training those who come in at the bottom rung.
“Without staff, you have nothing,” she says simply. She credits Dale Roberts for instilling this philosophy early.
Schulze is deliberate about the kind of dining she wants to create at Salon: something that feels generous and relaxed rather than stiff and formal. “Instead of going to a posh dinner where I need to sit up straight with a white tablecloth, we want guests to relax; we want them to feel spoilt.”
Her cooking philosophy has been sharpening in recent years, moving towards simplicity and restraint. The shift really took off in about June last year, when the arrival of quinces and citrus triggered something in her. She wanted guests to feel the excitement she experiences when a new ingredient comes into season. The answer was to strip things back — fewer ingredients, less complexity, less fuss. To let what she calls the “heroes of the dish” speak for themselves.
Winter, she says, is probably her favourite season for this reason. “For chefs, winter is like a kid in a candy store.” There is something about the arrival of cold-weather produce that excites her.
But if there is one dish that encapsulates her sensibility right now, it is a summer tomato preparation called simply “Roma Tomato”. She wraps a tomato in a fig leaf, ties it up and roasts it. Into the composition go octopus, saffron jelly, mussels, herbs and a cold oyster burrata at the base. When cut open, the dish reveals a vivid cross-section of orange, red and green. “It screams summer,” she says. She finishes it with the fig leaf. “We’ve almost changed how people perceive the tomato.”
Alongside the fine dining at Salon, Schulze runs a second, very different operation. How Bao Now was born in the suspended time of Covid lockdowns, when she and her friend and fellow chef Matt van den Berg (whose restaurant Mertia was named Restaurant of the Year at the LUXE awards) found themselves idle and craving the kitchen. “You start to get a bit of an itch. And you miss cooking for people — it’s what I love.”
What began as a side hustle — the pair would finish late shifts at The Test Kitchen and then stay up rolling bao buns — has grown into a legitimate enterprise at two locations: the Oranjezicht City Farm Market and the Time Out Market. Dale Roberts refused to let them stop when lockdowns ended.
“He let us use his equipment at the Test Kitchen,” Schulze says. “He said, ‘You cannot stop — this is a really amazing idea.’” How Bao Now has even begun incorporating elements of fine dining into its street food, including pork belly cured for 10 hours.
“I’d like to hope that, in some way, a bit of that feminine flair comes through,” she says of cooking at Salon. “The attention to detail. I am a bit of a perfectionist.”
The European sensibility that runs through her cooking has personal roots. Her father, Austrian by birth, was the cook in the household — the kind who made everything from scratch, including breadcrumbs for the schnitzels. Meals were eaten together at the table. Food was not incidental; it was central.
She recently discovered through an uncle that her father had always dreamt of opening a restaurant. “You kind of feel like you’re living off his legacy… That’s something I never knew.”
While there is a section of the industry that insists fine dining has had its moment, that its era of dominance is drawing to a close, Schulze is unconvinced. “I love the crazy things you get to do with food,” she says. “It’s part of who I am.”
She also pushes back on the notion that young South African chefs must travel to Europe to truly learn their craft. If Michelin came to South Africa, she believes, there would be no shortage of three-star restaurants.
“Young chefs should stay in South Africa and learn … they don’t need to go to France to learn how to make the perfect croissant,” she says. A natural question is whether she would want to go out on her own at any point. “I just idolise [Dale Roberts] so much; I would never want to leave.”
As for her favourite part of cooking, it’s sauces. Always sauces. “With a sauce you can taste everything that’s gone into it. It’s like the frame of the dish.” She insists that the day Dale Roberts put her on the sauce section at The Test Kitchen was one of the best days of her life.
One of her dreams has always been to run one of Dale Roberts’ restaurants. Now that she is doing exactly that, the response is not complacency — it is forward momentum. “Every day I’m questioning. I’ll change cocktails, and I’ll change our seasonal menu, and he encourages me.”
A decade in, and Carla Schulze is certainly not resting in someone else’s shadow.
