Vuur has just been ranked No 52 on the World’s 101 Best Steak Restaurants Awards — the highest placement ever recorded by an African restaurant on the list — and earned two stars at the Eat Out Woolworths Restaurant Awards 2026.
For chef Shaun Scrooby, who built this kitchen around a single fire and a strict commitment to local sourcing, the recognition makes sense. To understand why, you need to sit down at the table.
Preferably the private dining one under the oak tree. You’ll be there a while.
I sit down to lunch at Vuur — Scrooby’s private dining experience, running alongside Vuur Goose Island — and quickly lose track of time. Here time is no longer measured in minutes or hours but by the crackle of the fire inside and the shifting shadows cast by the great oak tree under which the table sits.
Zebra, springbok and one particularly feisty wildebeest — so we are told — graze just beyond, set against the Stellenbosch mountains. It feels staged. It isn’t. You’re in the Winelands, just outside Stellenbosch, and this is what lunch looks like.
The experience is relaxed in a way most tasting menus fail to be. No fluff, no overwrought front-of-house choreography, no long explanations before each plate lands.
Vuur is built on a simple premise: fire as an ingredient. Every dish passes through flame, ember or smoke. The cooking is controlled and deliberate — no tweezers, no nitrogen, no unnecessary theatrics. That clarity carries through the menu.
Fire may be the oldest cooking method we have, but this isn’t nostalgia; it’s clever, considered cooking — deceptively simple, perhaps. Ingredients come from local farmers, butchers and foragers, and the menu shifts weekly depending on what’s worth cooking. It keeps things real and ever-changing. It also means you’re unlikely to eat the same dish twice, even if you may want to.
On my visit, the experience begins with bone marrow sourdough, blueberry and buchu jam, rooibos-smoked honey butter and three thin slices of gloriously fatty Jersey beef salami. The combination sounds busy on paper but lands cleanly enough. The richness of the bread is cut by the jam’s acidity and sweetness, the smoke in the butter threading through everything. The salami whets the palate. By the time you’ve finished the course, you’ll be eagerly anticipating what’s to come.
Wood-fired dry-aged yellowtail follows with tomato, pepper and kale. The fire has done something particular to the skin — a char that stops precisely short of burnt bitterness — and the flesh underneath is smoky and tender. It’s the least exciting of the dishes, but not for any shortcomings; the others are just that much better.
For instance, an aged beef tartare arrives on grilled leek toast, toasted in beef fat and topped with Dalewood Huguenot. The leek adds sweetness, the cheese brings sharpness and the toast gives the dish texture. The tartare itself is excellent. Nothing overworked, nothing missing.
The main course is a 13-week dry-aged Wagyu-Angus prime rib, served with beef-fat potatoes and braised cabbage finished with miso caramel, black garlic, curried nuts and crisped shredded cabbage.
The meat is naturally cooked to perfection; the flavour developed over three months of ageing is only bolstered by what the fire adds.
The potatoes are the kind of thing you find yourself eating slowly to make them last. Though it’s the cabbage that is the surprise — it is, improbably, one of the best things on the table — braised in beef fat, deepened by that umami-sweet miso caramel and black garlic, and with added texture from those curried nuts and cheeky fried bits. Cabbage has no right to be this good.
Dessert leans into Scrooby’s wife’s Spanish roots: a burnt Basque cheesecake with salted dulce de leche and burnt hay ice cream. The hay ice cream is unusual — lightly smoky, slightly grassy — but it works; the cheesecake is spot on — I imagine the pressure to perform here is high.
Five pairings, all from Remhoogte, accompany the meal — a Free to Be Weisser Riesling with the bread, Honeybunch Chenin Blanc with the yellowtail, Vantage Pinotage with the tartare, Sir Thomas Cullinan 2021 with the prime rib, and Boustred White with dessert.
The cellar is a short walk from the table, and while the wines are limited to the estate, it doesn’t feel restrictive. Would it be better if the list were open to wines around the Cape? In hindsight, perhaps, but it’s not something that is missed on the day.
Vuur is a serious lunch. The private dining format means the experience is unhurried, the table entirely yours for the afternoon. There are restaurants that try to wow you, and then there’s Vuur, which just feeds you — exceptionally well under an oak tree.
Before I know it, the Stellenbosch Mountains are tinged purple by the setting sun, the game have wandered off, and I realise it has been six hours of glorious food, great wine, and, at least in my case, company to match.
Wanted
