It’s not an overstatement to say a life-changing auto-immune diagnosis initially derailed chef Tasmin Reed’s life and what was shaping up to be a dazzling career.

Just graduated from Silwood School of Cookery which she attended after matriculating, employed at Salsify at the Roundhouse, and on the verge of going to Australia to work with chef Peter Gilmore, in 2021 Tasmin’s kidneys said nope.

Before IgA nephropathy, she was the person who got up at 4am, went to gym, and went to work until whatever time the shift ended, because she loved what she was doing. “I went from that mindset to not even being able to get out of bed,” she says. “I went through a very bad patch. I’m a driven person with goals and I wanted things to go a certain way.”

To gloss over this and skip forward to where Tasmin is today is not to take anything away from the struggle she has endured, physically and mentally. Despite pushing herself to keep going and not wanting to admit defeat and give up everything she’d worked for and dreamed of, eventually she had to hang up her whites and go home to her family in KwaZulu-Natal. “Life told me I had to stop, so I did,” she says.

Life also threw her a safety line when Silwood offered her a teaching position, allowing her to stay in the industry, in a less frenetic environment. Meanwhile, so many doctors, so many chronic medications with often unpleasant side effects…Tasmin didn’t think she was ever going to be a chef again. “I was so different to who I had been. It was like mourning myself.”

But this young woman (she’s just 24) is nothing if not determined. She pursued therapies and protocols which would provide a natural fix for her condition: strict eating plans designed for her, swapping city-living for farm life, weekends off. It was a process, not an overnight fix, and it paid off.

Much research and becoming a specialist for her own wellbeing, Tasmin is paying it forward; she now owns and runs Melfort, at Marianne Wine Estate in Stellenbosch.

The restaurant, which has been open for a year and four months, is named to honour the legacy of her late grandfather, who had a farm by that name in Zimbabwe before it was seized and subsequently left in ruins.

“Melfort is a restaurant that depicts how food can heal,” says Tasmin. “I would have never found out how beneficial this type of eating is if I hadn’t struggled with the disease.”

Despite her youth, or perhaps because of it, Tasmin feels what she is doing is a calling, her life’s purpose, her very duty. Not just being a chef (that’s the means to the end), but to nourish her diners and simultaneously educate them as to how delicious healthy food can be.

“We open their minds,” she says. “They come here and hear chicken broth and think what the heck? Then they drink it – a delicious chicken broth with pork cheek dumpling. If you come here to eat delicious food, you’re going to get it but if you come here to understand why it’s so good for you, it will be a revelation.”

Tasmin uses ingredients like avocado and olive oil, wild and foraged foods, healing herbs, and the very best of everything from salts and spices, flours, and eggs, to meat to vegetables, many sourced from loyal local suppliers and small producers. Melfort will soon have its own garden planted with sustainable crops, another dedicated field to be cultivated on the farm, and milking sheep are on their way.

The dining at Melfort is refined, beautifully presented in a sharing format – another nod to how it was on Grandad’s farm – with no smoke, mirrors or fluff. Not short on techniques, there might be an espuma but it’s more about food with a story. “Our philosophy is we want to you to leave feeling better than when you arrived,” says Tasmin.

By offering the option for alternative dining, Melfort stands apart on the restaurant landscape, in the winelands and beyond, and in doing so it fits in perfectly with the culinary zeitgeist. With a bright future ahead of her, Tasmin’s career is well and truly back on track.