by Thinus Ferreira
The award-winning culinary travelogue series JAN is back for a third season from Thursday at 20:00 on both VIA (DStv 147) and Showmax with the new season that will chronicle the planning, drama, creation and opening night of the Michelin-star chef Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen's new Klein JAN restaurant in the Kalahari desert.
Produced by Brainwaves Productions and filmed mostly in Afrikaans and screened with English subtitles, viewers can get ready for an even more intimate season with the chef who this time traces the recent origin and evolution of an extraordinary idea - to open a restaurant and to serve dessert in a desert with a Khoisan-cuisine inspired menu.
The first two seasons of the beautifully filmed JAN took viewers to Italy and France and charted the chef's journey to Michelin stardom, while the third will take viewers on another breathtakingly beautiful journey to Tswalu Kalahari, the largest private game reserve in South Africa that is the setting for Klein JAN.
Through the course of 8 new episodes, Jan Hendrik takes viewers into his confidence about what a farm boy from Middelburg, whose whimsical fusion of South African cuisine with the finest French cooking has won favour with the world’s most exacting food critics on the French Riviera, dreams of in the enormous silence of the Kalahari desert.
Tswalu Kalahari is operated by the Oppenheimer family and Jan Hendrik's Klein JAN journey began several years ago when Jonathan and Nicky Oppenheimer enjoyed a meal at JAN, Jan-Hendrik's restaurant in Nice that has become the object of pilgrimage for South Africans traveling through the south of France.
This meeting leads to a 100-year old cottage in the proverbial middle of nowhere that would become the logistical and emotional crux of Jan Hendrik's new beginning.
"Beyond people's wildest expectations," is how project architect Adrian Davidson describes the project in the first episode of the third season, which introduces viewers to the reasons that prompted Jan Hendrik to set a table in the desert and his dream of putting the Kalahari on a pedestal where it could be admired by the whole world.
In the second episode, viewers are left in no doubt that Klein JAN was never going to be just another lodge restaurant.
A meeting with the Khoisan, one of the world’s most ancient living cultures, shapes the menu in
unexpected ways and viewers should be prepared for a tug at the heartstrings when Jan Hendrik's
grandmother's coal stove arrives on the farm.
The philosophy behind Klein JAN is to leave the lightest possible footprint while creating a world-class menu that showcases the best of local and indigenous produce – from 3-million-year-old salt
discovered in a salt pan in the middle of the desert, to the extraordinary cheeses made by a wine farmer in the Northern Cape and seen in episode four.
In the 6th episode, Jan Hendrik meets a female farmer as opening day is just a few weeks away, episode 7 captures the day before opening day, and episode 8 is there for the dramatic opening night of Klein JAN as guests are flown in from across South Africa.
