It’s a chilly Monday night and La Petite Colombe, set on the sprawling grounds of Leeu Estates in Franschhoek, is fully booked.
Like its sister restaurant, La Colombe in Constantia, its home sits among vineyards and manicured gardens. But where La Colombe is more about white-tablecloth formality, La Petite Colombe is more relaxed — the tie-optional cousin of fine dining.
There’s a country-elegant sensibility to the space: tiled floors and wide, open rooms give it the feel of a trattoria with a modern-country edge, a legacy of the building’s original plan to house an Italian restaurant. A bar sits at the centre of the room rather than tucked away at the back, giving it a natural place in the flow of the night. The floor-to-ceiling windows, earthy tones and natural wood and stone complete the relaxed, grounded atmosphere.
At the back of the main room, organically shaped niches that once displayed pottery now hold a growing collection of awards, most from Eat Out and the Gourmet Guide — two of the most sought-after accolades on South Africa’s culinary landscape.
Head chef Peter Duncan isn’t chasing a signature ingredient so much as a fusion of cultures, cuisines and styles. Over the past five years, he’s built a kitchen that operates less like a hierarchy and more like a collection of inherited recipes, regional pride and personal history — his own and that of everyone working alongside him.
“It’s about telling our story,” he says. “But it’s also about what the people working under me bring. It’s important that this story is theirs too.”
Duncan grew up in Saron, a small rural town between Tulbagh and Porterville, where fine dining wasn’t something he even knew existed. That changed when a culinary school placed him on an internship under Margot Janse, who was among the pioneers of fine dining in the country, which led him to La Colombe, the flagship restaurant of the group he still cooks for today. Along the way he’s worked with some of the biggest names on the local scene, including James Gaag and Scot Kirton of the La Colombe group.
Duncan describes his approach to food as one of absorption, with a background that stretches from Ireland to the Northern Cape to the Eastern Cape, a dozen bloodlines converging.
He’s also quick to defer to the people around him. His sous chef Chris makes a version of atchar that Duncan admits is better than the Cape Town version he grew up with — so that’s the version that made it onto the menu. The same goes for chakalaka.
Travel reinforced that same instinct. In Spain and South America, Duncan noticed an unguarded pride in what’s actually on the table.
“We tend to put so much pressure on ourselves,” he says, “and forget that what we have is as good as what’s overseas. That should be celebrated more.”
That philosophy shows up in a menu that leans into ingredients most fine-dining rooms shy away from: smoked chicken liver, mopane worms and fish heads.
La Petite Colombe operates within the broader La Colombe group, founded by Kirton and Gaag. Kirton’s standard, Duncan says, is disarmingly simple: it should taste delicious. Gaag, by contrast, approaches food with rigorous technical precision — and Duncan describes chasing that same technical bar as one of his biggest ongoing challenges, alongside a good-natured, competitive rivalry that runs through the whole group.
Everyone measures themselves against everyone else, he says, but it never curdles into pettiness. If one restaurant in the group spots an idea abroad that doesn’t suit its own menu but might suit a sister restaurant, it is passed along freely.
“We are in competition, but we are one big unit,” Duncan says.
Ask Duncan for his most-requested dishes and two stand out immediately — both pulled from the menu at some point, and both quickly reinstated after guests complained.
The first is simply called “the olive”, born from the Barcelona bar snack known as the gilda: an olive, anchovy, and pepper on a skewer. Duncan’s kitchen blitzes those classic ingredients into a liquid, freezes it in an olive-shaped mould, then dips the frozen centre in cocoa butter so it looks like an olive from the outside and bursts with that same briny, savoury liquid the moment it’s bitten. It’s vegan by design, so every guest can eat it, and it’s been on the menu for nearly five years.
The second is closer to home: a fish head soup built from a dish Duncan’s father — who worked in the fishing industry — grew up eating. It’s the kind of dish made in coloured communities from snoek, kabeljou and other catch that would otherwise go to waste, capable of feeding a family of four for a fraction of the cost of a restaurant meal.
Duncan’s father visited the restaurant in its first year and told him plainly he didn’t understand the “fancy” food or the language used to describe it. That conversation became the fish head soup’s origin story. Duncan took it off the menu once, decided within the year it had been a mistake, and put it back on.
Those same instincts shape the restaurant’s winter menu, which swaps in more affordable, in-season fish — sourced from small-scale fishers via Abalobi — such as silvers or Cape bream, without diluting the storytelling or detail of the full seasonal menu.
As for dinner, guests are first led to an informal lounge area for a glass of bubbly and a snack course — the highlight being a beautifully presented, three-tiered wicker basket of small, flavourful bites. Laid out with red-and-white cloth, it has the feel of a picnic in miniature, with morsels ranging from a salmon bagel to Cape Malay vetkoek. Through the rest of the dinner, portions stay relatively small, but every course packs a punch.
Dinner for us starts with the bread course, which arrives with butter shaped into playful forms, a small, tasty flourish before the meal properly begins.
From there: yellowfin tuna with Kerala and masi served on a raised, transparent plate with garden-fresh greens. A grain course with masala pork and bisque (a delicious tortellini, in my case). Kalamansi with worm salt. Then, before the mains, a colourful tray of grapefruit arrives, from which guests are handed a touch of sorbet to cleanse the palate.
For mains: coal-roasted lamb with harissa and tagine or, for a R650 supplement, Karoo Wagyu with Jerusalem artichoke and truffle.
Dessert is a choice between Emmental, pear and sourdough or sweet mielie, popcorn and miso — we went with the Emmental, presented on a clay plate whose open holes echo the cheese itself.
A sweet trolley follows, offering mini eclairs, a burst of tangerine, or the playful “Tonka bar” – a bite of fudge packaged like a Willy Wonka bar, complete with an edible “golden ticket” tucked inside.
Wine plays an important role throughout, particularly for those who opt for the pairing — Leeu Estates’ own Mullineux label is among the standouts on the list.
Towards the end of dinner, shuttles and Ubers begin arriving to collect guests, several of whom had travelled in from Cape Town for the night. The estate is private, so there’s no option to simply arrive unannounced, but visitors can book a daytime lunch or a wine tasting at Mullineux and take in the estate’s manicured gardens and larger-than-life statues.
La Petite Colombe currently holds three stars from the Eat Out awards, and Duncan is aiming higher. But what drives him most, he says, isn’t the accolades — it’s watching staff who started with nothing go on to own cars, send their kids to better schools, move out of their parents’ homes and start building lives of their own.
“That, for me, makes me happier than any award we can get,” he says. “It shouldn’t get to a point where, as a chef, you compromise your staff’s happiness for it. Then it’s not worth it.”
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Wanted
