Angel Leon earned three Michelin stars cooking the parts of the sea most kitchens throw back. His first restaurant outside Spain has opened inside a pink hotel in Cape Town, where the cold Atlantic and the warm Indian Ocean run into the same coastline.
Amura opened in December 2025 at Mount Nelson, a Belmond Hotel, on Orange Street in the Gardens. It is Leon's debut in Africa and the first time he has cooked under his own name outside Spain. The word amura is a sailing term, the forward corner of a sail, the part that meets the wind first.
The chef
Leon runs Aponiente near Cadiz, three Michelin stars, and Alevante nearby, two more. Spain calls him the chef of the sea. His kitchen works with plankton, sea grasses and the fish most restaurants ignore, the bycatch that comes up in the net by accident and usually goes back over the side.
Cape Town handed him a new coastline to read. The city sits where two currents meet, the cold Atlantic on one side and the warmer Indian Ocean on the other, each with its own fish and its own temper. The menu changes by the day, built around what the boats land and what would otherwise be wasted.
The food
Dishes stay close to the water. Yellowfin tuna tartare under a cured egg yolk. Smoked Cape salmon in a buttermilk sauce. Plankton risotto with squid, green and mineral and faintly of the tide. A raw fish charcuterie trolley comes to the table, the fish cured and sliced like cold cuts, on the idea that a fish carries as many textures as a pig.
The cooking shares a grammar with Cadiz. Southern Spain and the Western Cape both live off the Atlantic, both salt and cure and know their way around an anchovy. Leon treats the two coasts as one larder, Cadiz and Cape Town landing on the same plate.
Courtesy of Belmond — A scallop course at Amura, Mount Nelson, Cape Town
The room
Tristan du Plessis designed the space to read like the inside of a kelp forest. Amura sits in the hotel's old Planet Room and the former Cape Colony restaurant, under a painted ceiling. Chandeliers of burgundy glass hang in tiers. The palette runs deep green, bronze and dark timber, with a model sailing ship parked on a marble table between the booths.
An open kitchen lines one side, the pass in full view. A circular marble bar holds the centre, ringed by decanters under a brass crown. The room was built to be watched as much as eaten in.
Two oceans meet off the Cape. Leon cooks as though they were one water, and Cadiz were just up the coast.
The Splendid EditThe awards arrived fast. Best New Restaurant at the Eat Out Woolworths awards, a VISI Style Award, New Restaurant of the Year at the LUXE awards. Mount Nelson has been the pink grande dame of Cape Town since 1899, a long white driveway of palms off Orange Street. It now has a kitchen worth crossing the city for.
The details
The Splendid Edit on Amura by Angel Leon, Mount Nelson, A Belmond Hotel, Cape Town. Details from Belmond.
Photography courtesy of Belmond — Amura by Angel Leon, Mount Nelson, Cape Town