Mother Sippy: Jennifer Hugé

Welcome to Mother Sippy, where we shine a light on the winemakers, brewers, distillers and mixologists who make sure the Mother City never goes thirsty. From new releases to quietly obsessive craft, this is your guide to what’s shaping Cape Town’s world of drinks.

Jennifer Hugé has a way of being entirely, disarmingly present. It’s something you notice immediately, whether she’s explaining the finesse of a wine pairing or recounting the earlier days of her career at La Colombe.  

I first encountered Hugé not as a subject, but as a guest. My husband and I had booked lunch at FYN for our wedding anniversary, shortly after the restaurant had entered the World’s Best rankings. The dining room was full, the service intense, yet the attention paid to us felt utterly focused, as though our table was the only one that mattered. 

Hugé seems to listen as intently as she speaks, carrying the weight of decades of service, experimentation and intuitive care. 

Born in France and trained not through the usual rankings of culinary schooling but through from-the-bottom-up work, Hugé arrived in South Africa at 22, following her heart: “for love, for a man,” as she puts it candidly.

At the time, waitressing was the only work she could find. Two years later, she was effectively headhunted from an unassuming village bistro in Meadowridge by La Colombe founder Franck Dangereux, who recognised the same presence I would encounter years later. She joined the restaurant initially as a runner.

“It was intense, and I thought, this is not for me,” Hugé recalls. Dangereux eventually took her aside into a private dining room, poured her a glass of wine and said, “You are going to be awesome, just give it a chance.”

The words proved prophetic. Over the next decade, Hugé would become inseparable from fine dining excellence, first through La Colombe, rising to front-of-house manager and playing a key role in the restaurant’s ascent on both local and international stages.

Today, her contribution to hospitality has been formally recognised: Hugé was recently named Relais & Châteaux Women of the Year for 2026, an accolade widely regarded within the industry as both overdue and entirely fitting.

While I’ve conducted many interviews, few subjects draw you in the way Hugé does, moving fluidly between anecdote, technique and deeply instinctive knowledge. During our conversation, her fascination with fermentation quickly takes form. A beetroot kvass is summoned for tasting; moments later, a non-alcoholic cream-soda float cocktail appears.

Mother of Service, Grand Alchemist 

"It's something super cool, I am very big into clarification and forced carbination," adds Hugé, techniques she picked up while working at Overstory in New York about a year ago, one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. The drink, with slight cream soda notes in a coconut foam, is clean, earthy and balanced - challenging every tired assumption about mocktails as sugary afterthoughts.

For Huge, the ultimate would be never having to serve Coca-Cola or any other commercial cool drink again, instead mixing it all in-house.  

This sees Hugé’s reputation as the ‘Mother of Service’ give way to something spectacular in beverage direction, representing something closer to alchemy and a reimagining of how drinks sit within the dining experience.

“For me, beverage is not only wine,” she says. “There are so many out there, and you need to adapt yourself.”

That adaptability was tested when she left La Colombe shortly after Luke Dale Roberts’ departure, admitting simply that she “needed a change.”

Working on the FYN project build-up for nearly two years, she says, “was hard," particularly due to its Japanese influences. “I really enjoyed what Pete wanted to do, but it was very foreign to me. I had no understanding of it. It was like learning something from scratch.”

She contrasts the two worlds with clarity: French cuisine, she says, is about cream, richness, opulence; Japanese cuisine is about clean flavour and purity. “I had to adapt my pairing, my palate’s understanding of the cuisine.”

Fyn Fermentation  

Fermentation, too, sits at the heart of Hugé’s thinking, shaped by FYN’s broader focus on indigenous plants and the group's own garden at Beyond.

“Fynbos is great, not only in the food but also in the beverages for fermentation,” she says. “Again, it’s good for you. Beverages are about celebration - obviously they should go with the food - but they also need to be good for you.”

With as much skin in the game, it's hard for her not to notice these shifting dining habits - while meals once began predictably with MCC, cocktails, and alternative beverages are now an intrinsic part of the food conversation itself.

Breaking the wine-pairing ceiling

Sake became central to that evolution. “Sake is something that is new in South Africa, and I’m pushing it,” Hugé explains. She speaks about it not as an alternative trend, but as a serious, versatile category.

“It’s cleaner than wine - less sulphur, less additives. People are understanding now that sake is quite versatile. You don’t only drink sake with sushi. You can have it with meat.”

Her commitment took her far beyond the import-export constraints of sake and deep into rural Japan. Yet again, she hit the craft at ground level to make sure she could fully encapsulate it.

Hugé describes how she must have cut an entirely out-of-place figure walking through rice fields in extreme heat, a rollie suitcase in hand, to explore an artisanal sake brewery where they don’t speak a word of English.

These are places where tradition is still lived, shares Hugé, not curated - places where, she warns, generational craftsmanship is quietly under threat.

“It’s generations and generations of craftsmanship that are disappearing,” she says, pushing back against the idea that such sourcing is indulgent.

“When people say it’s not sustainable, I disagree.” At FYN, this philosophy translates into restraint rather than excess: a tightly edited sake selection, she explains, is secured directly through the connections made during her travels to gain a deeper understanding.

Beyond fashionably sustainable

That same clarity and depth of knowledge guide her work at Arum, where she shaped the wine programme around relevance rather than reputation. 

“Even at Arum, we had to do only Boschendal wine - there’s nothing wrong with Boschendal wine,” she says, choosing to see it as a beautiful constraint to build a wine list around heritage and terroir. 

Semillon, alongside lesser-known varietals such as Alicante Bouschet and Cinsault, is part of her selection. With cooking driven by fire, she sought reds that were “earthy” and “smoky,” wines that made sense with flame-led dishes. 

Sustainability, for Hugé, is also inseparable from the process. 

“There are varietals that are going to become very prominent in the future because of global warming and the impact of drought,” she says. “We need to adapt ourselves to what is happening now.”

She is clear-eyed about the broader implications: “People always think climate impact is only agricultural, but it affects everything - food, beverage, hospitality.” Winemakers, she notes, are already responding, choosing what to plant with drought and climate in mind. “It’s not only about what's in fashion,” Hugé says.

She shares with delight special finds, like a limited Crouchen sourced from Alex McFarlane, or a West Coast haul from Sakkie Mouton, as examples - especially as "people thought nothing would grow on the West Coast."

Despite the intensity of her career, Hugé speaks openly about what it has required of her. She admits to having pushed too hard, for too long, learning, sometimes painfully, the importance of balance. 

She admits to being exacting and demanding, but also deeply invested in care, accountability, and growth - as is the case with the team she now mentors at Arum.  

"We kept a lot of the staff from the previous restaurant, and we're going back to the real basics. They need to be nurtured. We are under a lot of pressure now, so it's important for them to feel part of something."  

This all comes back to Hugé's ability to hold space generously when it comes to hospitality, without theatre or strain.

"It's part of my French DNA and culture. It's what I grew up with."

And if you’ve ever encountered Jennifer Hugé, you already understand.