Under my bed I keep a big box of old photographs. Somewhere in there is one of Margot Janse, taken in 1988. She is perched on a low barrier at a checkin desk at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. Margot is the sister of Dutch interior designer Herbert Janse, who is a good friend of mine.

When the picture was taken, Herbert was going on a trip around the world and I was among the group of friends who had come to see him off.

Margot was 19 at the time and full of great ambitions. She wanted to be an actress and attended the theatre school in Maastricht for a year, but had not been accepted to the second year.

At the time that the photo was taken, she was somewhat at a loss and wondering which path to take now.

Margot had a boyfriend called David Greybe, a white South African supporter of the ANC who had fled the apartheid regime. They met while he was working as a journalist in Amsterdam.

During her admission interviews at the theatre school, Margot had been told that she "should go and see some of the world", so she decided to do precisely that: a year after that picture was taken at Schiphol, Margot and David left for Zimbabwe, as husband and wife. He had plans to get involved in Dutch development fund projects intended to help the country get back on its feet, while Margot would start a puppet theatre in the slums of Harare. I lost touch with Margot after she left, but through Herbert I learnt that she eventually became a chef and was doing well. But that was all I knew.

Home recognition

So imagine my surprise when I read an item in the Dutch newspaper 'De Telegraaf' profiling top chef Margot Janse, whose stellar culinary creations dazzle diners at the distinguished Le Quartier Français restaurant in Franschhoek, the food and wine capital of South Africa.

The management of the Okura Hotel had recently invited her to spend two weeks in Amsterdam, preparing her gastronomic masterpieces at the prestigious Le Ciel Bleu restaurant on the hotel's 22nd floor.

I got in touch with Margot. On the phone from South Africa, her voice bubbled with the same enthusiasm I remembered from 20 years ago. She told me that she now leads a team of 30 cooks, that she has a young son, and is now married to a British man named Duncan Doherty who runs another restaurant in Franschhoek. And yes, she would be happy to meet the next time she visited the Netherlands.

For four consecutive years Margot has been one of the few female chefs to rank among the top 50 restaurateurs in the world, but she is virtually unknown in the Netherlands. To be invited by Le Ciel Bleu felt for her like a kind of recognition from her native country.

"My mother always said, 'She's a good cook, but she does live in Africa'. This suddenly makes it all real," Margot says.

Changing times

It is 2008 when Margot and I meet for the first time in 20 years at Le Ciel Bleu, the only restaurant in Amsterdam that can boast two Michelin stars.

She had arrived from Cape Town the previous day, and she and chef Onno Kokmeijer are busy at work preparing dishes for the seven-course menu that would be served through the two weeks to come — which were already booked solid.

Margot has changed very little. She still wears her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and she still has her infectious laugh.

She describes how her first years in Africa were coloured by the fight against apartheid. She and David lived in the home of a journalist friend.

"We did not have a penny to our names," she recalls.

"We had to walk to this little office to fax news stories. Sometimes we treated ourselves to — how British — tea and toasted chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches in the exclusive Meikles Hotel in Harare. We would pull the halves of toast apart in order to make it seem like more."

When South Africa began releasing the first political prisoners in 1990, Margot and David went to Lusaka in Zambia, where the ANC had its headquarters at the time. There shemet its leaders Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and also, later, Nelson Mandela.

As a "good white man", David's career took off, and he filed pieces for newspapers around the world. Margot meanwhile turned her talents to photography and made a name for herself in her husband's wake. Using a borrowed camera, she took pictures that she sold to the British and American dailies.

Lowly beginnings

When the curtain finally came down on the apartheid era, Margot and David — and thousands of other exiles along with them — returned to South Africa.

The couple settled in Johannesburg. At home, Margot spent most of her time cooking. She planned dinner parties and friends were always dropping by.

"What I loved was trying out new recipes," she recalls. "I was 23, still didn't have any career to speak of, and decided that if I enjoyed cooking so much, then it was something I should pursue."

The only problem was that no-one was offering gourmet cooking classes in South Africa at that time. So Margot summoned her courage and started applying to restaurants.

Towards the end of 1992, she was given a position at Ciro's, a renowned Italian restaurant in Johannesburg whose main patrons were businessmen.

"I had to clean 40 pounds of squid," Margot remembers. "Pretty nasty work, but I was over the moon to be allowed to work in the kitchen of such a great restaurant."

Margot worked morning and evening shifts and, since she didn't own a car and lived at the opposite end of the city, going home in the afternoon was out of the question.

She started using the time to read up on recipes and invent new dishes. "It was like being in a playground," Margot says.

"The owner would taste something I'd made and would usually say, 'This is fantastic. We'll turn it into today's special.' "

In 1994, two days after Mandela was elected president, Margot and David moved to Cape Town, where David had been offered a well-paying job working for a national newspaper.

Margot went looking for new employment as a cook and was hired by the exclusive Bay Hotel in Camps Bay, nestled between the foot of Table Mountain and the beach.

"The Bay's menu was reminiscent of the creations of British top chef Marco Pierre White," says Margot. "They really made wonderful things. I thought: 'I absolutely have to work here'."

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