Mile 500 - Five Hundred at the Saxon

Appears in
Mile 8: A book about cooking
Mile 8

By David Higgs

Published 2018

  • About

After a year at the Radisson, I took over as the Executive Chef for The Saxon hotel. This meant overseeing all of the hotel’s cuisine, but with a special focus on Five Hundred, a fine dining restaurant which we opened in 2012. Strangely enough, it was here, in the centre of this bustling city, that I built my first vegetable garden. Everything that we did at Five Hundred was dictated by produce ...

I came from Cape Town, where I had worked on two wine estates, and I had never had a proper vegetable garden. Unbelievable, I know. Here I was in the middle of Joburg and I decided that we should have a vegetable garden. Where? On the roof, of course. This sums up this city to me. Anything is possible. Opportunity is everywhere. Just do it.