Less Is More at the Food Barn

For the 10 years that he ran the kitchen at La Colombe, the award-winning French restaurant on Cape Town's Constantia Uitsig wine estate, Franck Dangereux was hailed by many as the best chef in Africa. An émigré from Provence, Dangereux blended traditional French cuisine with South African ingredients to such perfection that he earned a spot on Restaurant Magazine's list of the world's 50 best restaurants in 2006. Then he quit.

Dangereux didn't explicitly say he was finding the whole high-class restaurant thing pretentious. But what he did was to take over a small replica barn in a...