Cape to Cairo, Shildon: Extraordinary melting pot of south Durham and west Africa

Cape to Cairo is an African restaurant in the heart of the south Durham coalfield.

It is in a typical late Victorian industrial pub, with dark wood doors and heavy plaster ceiling roses, set in a post-industrial landscape: many of the properties in its terraced block are boarded up.

It is named after a planned railway that was going to run 3,500 miles the length of the African continent, while outside its door runs the trackbed of the Stockton & Darlington Railway that ran 26 miles from the coalfield to the port.

Indeed, in 1825, when the pub was called the Masons Arms, Locomotion No 1 began its inaugural journey from outside its doors, and so now that it is called Cape to Cairo, one wall is dedicated to photographic railwayana.

Inside Cape to Cairo, with sawn wood and African art masking the old features of the pub

The other walls are covered in Africana – plates and bowls with exotic creatures on them – while the rough sawn, glass topped tables double as display cases for tribal masks, colourful linen and aromatic spices. The windowsills are crowded with wooden elephants, giraffes and wildebeests so the red-coated huntsman in the stained glass of the seatbacks, who once used to advertise Tetley’s beer, is now completely out of place. Unless, of course, he is going on a big game safari with a frothing pint in his hand.

Only this is a pub that no longer sells alcohol.

We were, though, encouraged to go along the road to a corner shop, which has the narrowest aisles, where we acquired a half decent bottle of Chilean red for £6.99.

Cape to Cairo

And – another incongruity – although we live in the 2022 cost-of-living crisis, the prices in Cape to Cairo are pre-credit crunch: starters and desserts are £4.50, main courses come in at about £8.50.

The menu is global. There are Indian, Malaysian and South African curries. There are grills featuring spices from Mozambique, Senegal and Jamaica. There’s a Moroccan tagine, a Creole stew, a Freetown fish dish and a Liberian eggplant, plus there are breakfasts from Guyana, America and, of course, England.

There is plenty marked on the menu as being vegan and gluten free, and when we asked what a Jamaican pattie was, someone from the kitchen was brought out to explain and we discovered that the restaurant is Shildon front of house and African behind the scenes.

The pattie – which is a kind of Caribbean pasty with pulled beef in the centre – was probably the least successful of our three starters because it was so bready round the outside that the meat in the middle got lost.

Petra, my wife, had the daal, which in some Indian restaurants can be thin, runny and anaemic. This was thick and golden and full of taste, although it came with a piece of bread that got a bit soggy.

The Jamaican patties as a starter

I had the Smokey Pitt Beans on Toast, which is a West African stew of white and kidney beans plus tomatoes and a bit of bacon and it packed a wonderful punch: gloriously rich and smokey.

For our main course, Theo, our son, and I shared a Cape Platter (£20), so we could sample as many tastes as possible. It consisted of four dishes of beautifully juicy chicken marinated in different spices. We tried the Cape Seasoning (okay), the Jamaican jerk (fine), the Senegalese Yassa (a good pitch of lime running through it), and the Mozambique peri peri which I thought was excellent – fiery without overpowering the chicken.

It was far too hot for Theo, but there was plenty of other tastes for him, as the chicken came sizzling in metal bowls with onions and green peppers, plus there were sides of cooling coleslaw, good chips, joloff rice and deep fried plantains.

Plantains and joloff rice

He particularly liked the joloff rice, which is an orange African rice with gentle spices and tomatoes through it, although the plantains were not to his taste. They are “cooking bananas”, and they come as fleshy lumps with a neutral taste. While they are entertaining and different in a restaurant like this – in our pre-meal discussions, we expected to be served them – it is understandable why they haven’t gone global.

Genevieve, our daughter, also chose from the grill, going for a beef jerk wrap (£7.50) to which she added a portion of chips (£3). It came held together with so many cocktail sticks that it looked like a porcupine, but again the meat was nicely cooked with a hint of jerkiness to it.

The homemade cheesecake at Cape to Cairo

Petra’s main course was a taco, for which she chose four vegetarian fillings (£5.50). On this global cuisinary tour, we expected it to be a Mexican-style taco in a crispy tortilla shell with the fillings open to the elements, but instead we reckon it was probably a French taco, with the ingredients folded inside a tortilla which is then toasted in a sandwich maker. All covered up, it was a bit bland, and, with hindsight, she probably should have added a seasoned sauce to it.

For desserts, our tour of the world came home. Theo fancied apple crumble and custard, which had unfortunately run out, so he joined me in rice pudding, while Genevieve opted for a biscoff cheesecake. All the cheesecakes are homemade in unAfrican flavours – I don’t know if biscoff is big in Bulawayo, but Oreo and Malteser are not ingredients naturally associated with the continent – and very good, with a proper base and tasty topping.

The rice pudding, also very homemade, divided opinion. It was served with maple syrup and had a huge amount of cardamom in it so that its perfume filled the airways in my head. I thought there was too much cardamom, but Theo loved it and would have inhaled it if it weren’t so hot.

Our bill for three courses for four people, with plenty of soft drinks, came to £71.40, plus the £6.99 spent in the corner shop.

There are more rough edges at Cape to Cairo than on the sawn wood which has been used to modernise the dark old pub. It is not silver service nor haute cuisine, and with Buffalo Soldier bouncing out of the loudspeaker, it is not an intimate, candlelit setting.

However, it is a remarkable melting pot, where south Durham meets west Africa, where new life sprouts in a post-industrial landscape, where the coalfield is blown away by cardamom. It is a curious juxtaposition in Shildon, but, even if not every dish worked, the cooking is genuine and the tastes as vibrant as the whole enterprise is valiant.

Cape to Cairo

225, Byerley Road, Shildon DL4 1HH

Tel: 01388-775914

Web: capegrill.co.uk (also a good page on Facebook @capetocairodurham

Open: 10am to 9pm (10pm on Fridays and Saturdays, 6pm on Sundays when English roasts are served)

Ratings (out of ten): Surroundings 6 Food quality 7 Service 7 Value for money 8