High variety

WORDS Nechama Brodie

Lees in Afrikaans.

Award-winning chef David Higgs takes Nechama Brodie on a tour of his new rooftop garden at the Saxon Hotel. 

“How big is the garden?” I say to executive chef David Higgs.  

We’re standing under a grey Highveld sky in the middle of a verdant crop of flowers and vegetables, planted in neat timber-bordered rows on the flat-top roof of a covered parking area at the Saxon Hotel in Johannesburg. 

“No idea,” he says. “I’ll tell you in a second.”

He walks slowly all the way down the one side, comes back and repeats the same exercise on the cross. 

“20 by 30,” he says. 

“Feet?” I ask. 

“No, metres.” 

“How do you pace in metres?”

“Like this,” he says, showing off his stride again, as if it were obvious. 

Perhaps it’s easier when you’re tall.  

A little space on the roof

The [roughly] 600 square-metre rooftop garden has become something of a passion project for David, who joined the Saxon nearly a year ago after leaving the Radisson Blu in Sandton. 

“I’d been here about three months before I was told there was a ‘little space on the roof’ where they’d been trying to get a herb garden going.”

David says when he went to see the garden there was “one aubergine plant, a bayleaf tree and mint. Lots and lots of mint.”

David left the lot as winter approached, but started planning for summer. 

To develop the space, he contacted Sought After Seedlings to plant and populate the garden. “They do a lot of heirloom stuff,” he explains, adding that diversity (and taste) was essential. “We didn’t want loads of…”

“Iceberg lettuce?” I volunteer. He nods.  

Nine months later, the garden is fully established: there is a worm farm (under cover, on the roof) and a compost heap (supplemented with liquid waste from the kitchen – something that’s important “for a hotel to do, especially in the city”). Sought After Seedlings do the planting, the kitchen staff does the picking, and there is a dedicated gardener who maintains the space. 

A game-changer 

Between the herbs and vegetables, the gardens are planted with flowers – some are edible, others are to keep away pests or encourage bees. The garden is entirely organic; special soil was even brought in during its construction. 

The layout encourages a vegan sort of nose-to-tail eating: a bean plant produces beautiful purple flowers that are “incredibly tasty,” David says. 

Later he pulls off a tiny red flower from a bush of Pineapple Sage. “Taste this,” he suggests. The end of the flower is sweet with nectar. It’s a bit like being a kid again.  

“The staff are always up here, wandering through the garden, breaking open the pods,” David says. “To be able to pick your own veg and cook it on that day – the colours, the flavours…” 

The garden is planned monthly, seasonally, in conjunction with Sought After Seedlings. David says it’s a “game changer. I realised that when I design menus it’s always based on protein. Now, when I walk in the garden and see purple beans I start working on what we can do with them – that visual stimulation changes the process.”

Self-sufficiency

The garden already supplies most of the herbs and vegetables needed for Five Hundred, David’s new signature concept restaurant (a six-course menu is R1 550 per person, including wine; the four-course menu option R1 100). 

David says diners are raving about the fresh borlotti beans and tarragon (“it grows like a weed,” he says of the herb) in a tomato emulsion, served with free-range rib-eye and herb dumplings. The garden’s heirloom tomatoes accompany another dish: David uses five different varietals to accompany smoked farmed kabeljou. 

In planning and developing the garden, David spent time looking at other urban garden initiatives in Johannesburg – like those on the rooftops of the Maboneng Precinct. 

“We were talking a while ago,” he says, “about an article we’d read – on New York. It said something like if all the rooftops in New York were planted they would feed a quarter of the city. I’ve worked on three farms. It’s crazy that I had to come to the city to plant my own vegetable garden.”

Five Hundred is open Tuesday to Saturday. For more information go to www.saxon.co.za