Kelp forest off Cape Town provides inspiration for local chef

Kelp is essential to oceans, providing a habitat for numerous marine life and keeping the ocean clean by trapping carbon. It’s also long been a part of Asian cuisine, but now a chef in Cape Town is turning seaweed into a gastronomic experience.

Here in the waters off Cape Town’s southern penninsula, chef Phil Mansergh is stocking up supplies. But he hasn’t come for fish – he’s here for the vast kelp forest that lies beneath the waves off the coast of South Africa and Namibia.

“What’s cool about kelp is that there’s a lot of it that grows on our coastline, it’s highly nutritious, it’s a great substitute for pasta, and it’s super versatile,” Mansergh says. “And, it doesn’t taste anything like you think it might. It’s quite neutral.”

According to local experts, the kelp forest off Cape Town is one of the healthiest and most resilient in the world, fertilized by nutrients from the depths of the ocean. And it also makes for a healthy snack, says marine biologist Professor Emeritus John Bolton of the University of Cape Town:

“Seaweeds are very good nutritionally. They don’t have an awful lot of protein and not an awful lot of fats, lipids, although they have good lipids, but they’re full of minerals, they’re full of vitamins, lots of things. The sea has all sorts of trace elements that seaweeds take up. So they’re very good for people, although only in Asia in the past have people eaten seaweed in a large way, but it’s spreading into the western world.”

Mansergh is leading the way at his off-grid restaurant, the Kelp Shack.

From hollowed out sea bamboo stuffed with rice, to kelp pâté and fermented crudite – his aim is to create beautiful, great tasting dishes that will change people’s perception of kelp.

Canadian tourist Kyla Johnson is a fan.

“So, this was my first time, trying something like this, with kelp as the main ingredient throughout all the dishes, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a complete surprise because I definitely thought it would be mostly seaweed-tasting and fish-tasting but it was just a whole profile of different flavours.”

Mansergh established the Kelp Shack in 2018 and it operates on word of mouth and online sites like Instagram.