By MIKE HALLS
Darling Brew founded in 2010 by Kevin and Philippa Wood, started life as a tasting room in Darling, contract brewing their beers in Cape Town. Finally in 2015 they opened the impressive brewery that they are based in today.
“The new Darling Brew Tasteroom and Brewery was built with recycled and eco-friendly material. The furniture was created by Darling artisans. The restaurant uses locally sourced produce. Each beer flavour represents an animal in trouble in Africa and every beer label tells the story and creates awareness of the plight of that animal. The Tasteroom offers shower facilities and bicycle racks for Mountain Bike enthusiasts – an eco-friendly sport that Darling Brew supports. Most importantly the new Brewery houses the core support team, which includes young locals being taught the art of brewing.”
I have visited Darling Brew many times. It’s a great venue to sit and have lunch and a couple of beers while the kids can run around and play on the massive Jungle Jim. Today was my first visit since the restaurant has changed hands. I must say, I was a massive fan of the previous restaurant. I loved the simplistic menu and the food was always great. The service has never been the greatest here, but when one of your beers is called Slow, you can get away with slightly slow service. Today was particularly busy, due to the wild flower season up the West Coast. We sat and watched numerous people arrive and get turned away as they were full. Considering most of them had probably done the same hour long drive as we had to get there this seemed such a shame. In the past they had set up lots of ‘picnic’ style tables on the grass, made out of old pallets. This was a great way to generate extra seating, but for some reason these have now been removed.
We did not have a good experience today with the food, and the other customers we spoke with had a similar experience. I spoke to the manager who was very apologetic. Due to how unusually busy it was today, I made a promise to return again and give the food a proper review.
However, I did get the chance to review all their beers, you can get a link to these reviews by clicking the images below.
