Dinner with a Story: What to Expect, Act by Act

Dinner with a Story is an 11-course evening at the Dare2Dream Dome Restaurant, at Forum Homini Boutique Hotel in the Cradle of Humankind, north-west of Johannesburg. Nine of the courses are served as acts: a tale from Karina Marais’s memoir, one of her songs and a dish. The other two, a grappa and a sorbet, are pauses in a lit forest. The evening moves between places, from the hotel to that forest and then across a bridge to a transparent dome. It runs on selected days only, and bookings go through Forum Homini.

Karina Marais sums up Dare2Dream in her culinary guide: it “is not a restaurant with a story, it is a story with a restaurant”. What follows is the evening as that guide and her restaurant’s menu set it out, act by act, with the practical details that are published and a plain note on the ones that are not.

What Dinner with a Story is

The dinner began as the ending of a book. While writing Upstairs Downstairs: A Musical Memoir, Karina Marais wondered what her “final purple cow” would be: one last element to make the memoir stand out beyond its lyric readings, music and videos. The answer she gives on her restaurant’s website is this dinner, and the culinary guide that maps it.

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The Dome Restaurant was built for the memoir. A place created to inspire guests to dream again.

Her site offers two menus: an 11-course “FUN dining” dinner and a 3-course “FUN breakfast”, each dish “presented as an ACT: a tale, a song, and a taste”. The music comes from her three albums: 32 tracks, including a medley, created for the memoir.

The dome itself has a short history. According to Get It magazine, she first pictured a fairy-tale forest inside the hotel’s conference venue. Her husband took her instead to a clearing with a fallen tree, across a little bridge, and suggested she build her dome restaurant there. It opened four months later. The memoir’s pre-launch dinner took place there in November 2025, weeks before the book came out in January 2026. The memoir behind the menu has its own page, and the full menu, course cards and booking details sit on the dinner page.

Where it happens

Forum Homini is a boutique hotel with suites for overnight guests and a second restaurant, Roots. Its address is Letamo Game Estate, Kromdraai, R540 (off the N14), Mogale City, Gauteng, and it publishes the GPS point -26.026052, 27.766271 for drivers. If you want to make a day of it, there is a plan for a full day out, from the fossil caves to dinner.

The published photographs show the way in. A neon-pink Dare2Dream sign arches over a timber boardwalk edged with warm light. Steel sculptures of women, whose bodies turn into roots and branches, stand at the gate. Trees are lit green and violet, and at the end of the path a geodesic dome of clear panels sits on a raised deck, lit purple, blue, teal or red. Inside, a giant butterfly sculpture hangs over a garden of greenery. Her site describes the route in one line: guests step into a fantasy setting before crossing a bridge to the dome.

How the evening flows

Her culinary guide (opens in a new tab) carries the programme from the launch in November 2025. That is the timetable the dinner followed then. Times on your evening may differ, so confirm them when you book.

Get It magazine, describing the same dinner, names the places in order: the Forum Homini lounge, the entrance to the forest, a red-lit spot deep in the forest, and then the dome. This is a dinner you walk through. The route runs over boardwalks and a bridge in the open air, so plan shoes and a warm layer for walking outside at night. No dress code is published.

At the launch, according to a guest who wrote about the night, Karina told stories from her life between the songs and talked about the food. It rained softly, and every guest was handed a raincoat and an umbrella.

The 11 acts: a tale, a song and a taste

The numbers below follow the restaurant’s menu. Her guide numbers its acts a little differently: it treats the grappa as an interlude and serves the coffee as a double act, 10 and 11. Every named song is on Spotify, and each one plays in the site player while you read.

A few acts are worth knowing about before you sit down:

• Candyfloss (course 1). The tale comes from chapter 2.1. As a child she was fascinated by candyfloss, big and fluffy and then gone, “leaving only sweetness and sticky fingers behind”. The mocktail is poured over it, and the song is Where Dreams Begin.
• A first macaron (course 2). In 2004 she presented her Running with Bulls board game to a New York Stock Exchange director, who offered her macarons with coffee at lunch. She had never tasted one (chapter 5.3).
• Soup like a cappuccino (course 3). A 2006 dinner overlooking the Sydney Opera House began with pea soup served in an espresso cup under frothy foam. That meal gave her husband ideas for Roots, the hotel’s other restaurant. Here it returns as a cappuccino-style tomato soup (chapter 7.4).
• Caviar and cava for a first song (course 4). The day her first song arrived from a producer in Bali, the couple celebrated with cava and caviar (chapter 1.3). The song is Upstairs Downstairs.
• Dessert, fifth (course 5). The Purple Pears come early on purpose. In the film The Taste of Things, marriage is compared to a dinner that begins with dessert, and she writes that Living Apart Together lets the couple stay in that “dessert phase” (chapter 7.6). Get It reports that this course is served under purple light.
• A painting on a plate (course 6). The Pierneef Leeks honour the painter Pierneef and his South African landscapes. Her tale describes the dish behind them, green roasted leeks with goat’s cheese mousse, popped buckwheat and a cured egg yolk, and says of that meal, “It felt as if we were dining inside a work of art” (chapter 9.2). A guest at the launch described the leeks arranged to form a Pierneef painting.
• A last-supper choice (course 8). If she had to choose a last supper, she writes, it would be a toss-up between snow crab with melted butter and a corn muffin, and lamb tails with putu pap. The dinner serves the snow crab; the lamb tails come at breakfast (chapter 2.1).
• A fallout, and a dish cooked again at home (course 10). The Hainan Chicken recalls the one serious fallout she describes, on the Chinese island of Hainan, and the dish the couple later made again at home (chapter 9.3).
• The Swan Cups (course 11). Coffee with glazed ginger and marshmallows by candlelight closes the dinner. Its tale is the day two cups on one saucer arrived, which felt “like holding a dream made tangible”, and its song is the popera Swan Cups of Love. Her restaurant’s website says guests use the Swan Cups at the Dinner with a Story (chapter 9.1).

The plates are part of the design too. Core Catering, which supplied the glassware and tableware, says it developed bespoke plates made for the venue.

Drinks, and pauses in the forest

The dinner is not paired with wine. The first course is a mocktail: in the published photographs, a pink drink is poured over candyfloss in a cocktail glass.

Twice the dinner steps back outside. Her guide’s grappa page shows small glasses on tree-stump tables inside a border of rope lights, and its sorbet page shows a red glass chandelier hanging from a branch above a stump, both in the Fantasy Forest. Neither course has a song of its own; both are served with music from her albums.

Breakfast with a story

The same idea runs through a 3-course “FUN breakfast”. Each course has a tale and a song:

• Grand Fruit Parfait (breakfast 1). From the fruit salad her former mother-in-law made for Sunday lunches, which Karina calls “the best in the world” (chapter 2.3).
• Croissant with caramelised banana and hot milk (breakfast 2). Her mother’s rainy-day treat: stale bread torn into a tall glass on a saucer and filled with steaming milk (chapter 2.1).
• Lamb tails with putu pap (breakfast 3). A cold morning in the late 1960s on a Karoo farm, the children in coats and mittens around an open fire (chapter 2.1). The song is Haute Lamb Tails for Two.

The published details do not say whether breakfast is only for guests who stay the night. Ask when you book, especially if you want dinner and breakfast on the same visit.

Plan your evening

• Booking. Email reservations@forumhomini.com or call 071 533 1019. Or use the Dare2Dream booking page at Forum Homini (opens in a new tab).
• Days and price. Her site says “selected days only”. Neither the days nor the price are published, so ask for both.
• Age. No children under 12: every guest must be 12 or older.
• Dietary needs. Forum Homini says it caters at Roots for dietary needs confirmed before arrival. It publishes nothing on this for Dare2Dream, so raise them when you book.
• Staying over. The online booking page (opens in a new tab) sells bed-and-breakfast rates, with dinner available on request when you choose your rate, and says guests may choose between Roots and Dare2Dream for dinner. Check-in is from 14:00 and check-out at 10:00. The page asks for a 50% deposit, with the balance due seven days before arrival.

Couples planning a special night will find the dinner, a cave-style suite and the morning after laid out in a plan for couples in the Cradle.

Before you go: read, listen, watch

Nothing in the published details asks you to prepare, and the launch programme opened with an introduction to the book. Still, the evening means more if you know the story.

• Read. Upstairs Downstairs: A Musical Memoir by Karina Marais tells how she and her husband have lived apart together for more than 20 years, his bachelor pad upstairs and her retreat downstairs. Three chapters lead straight to the table: the caviar and cava of chapter 1.3, the dessert phase of chapter 7.6 and the Swan Cups of chapter 9.1.
• Listen. The songs are on her three albums. The song list can be switched to dinner order, so you hear the courses in the order they are served.
• Watch. Two short videos show the place: a two-minute introduction to the dome, posted in November 2025, and a 27-second walk through the Fantasy Forest, posted in September 2026.

For the science behind a dinner built for all five senses, read why sound, colour and story change how food tastes.