JAN S3 | Binge episodes 1-3 now, with new episodes every Thursday

South Africa’s first Michelin-star chef, Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen, returns for a new season of his South African Film and Television Award-winning VIA show, JAN, hailed by Good Things Guy as “a TV show that has us all drooling” and by WatKykJy as “a new level of Afrikaans food television.” 

Whereas the first two seasons took viewers to France and Italy, with a focus on how Jan combined French and South African cooking in his restaurant in Nice, JAN, Season 3 charts the launch of the chef’s latest venture, KLEIN JAN, a new restaurant in the heart of the Kalahari, where the region’s underexplored ingredients were the perfect inspiration to open a new restaurant and bring fine dining home – giving the food from the Kalahari the global stage it deserves.

“I never really knew the Kalahari until five years ago,” says Jan Hendrik. “Until then, I had heard about its vastness – the wide expanse of dry earth with its warm-hearted people – but the thought of laying down roots here never occurred to me. What opportunities could a harsh and arid terrain like this hold for a chef? But the Kalahari found me, and when it did, I was forever changed.”

The new season of JAN takes you on the journey of opening a restaurant in a place where every ingredient is unimaginably scarce. It is also an ode to the people of the Kalahari and the Northern Cape, especially the growers and makers of the region whose passion and vision for mindful, sustainable agriculture is fuelling the global call for more responsible farming and supplier practices. From the salt pans in the middle of the desert, to an artisanal cheesemaker in Augrabies who makes all his cheese in the same twenty-litre pot, the people of the Kalahari work with a keen awareness that ingredients are not infinite, but precious.