The Great White House is a seafood restaurant in Gansbaai where you eat beneath the skeleton of a southern right whale named Suzi, suspended from the thatched ceiling. The fourteen-meter skeleton washed ashore in 2005 and took seven years to preserve before being mounted here in 2013. Alongside it are smaller whale and dolphin skeletons, and artifacts from the HMS Birkenhead shipwreck that sank nearby in 1852.

The kitchen serves breakfast, lunch and dinner with a seafood focus — line fish, calamari, and locally foraged kelp dishes. The Southern Right Bar stocks Overberg wines and gins. Families use the outdoor courtyard with its play area while diners take tables near the indoor fireplace or beneath the whale display.

Three cottages stand a short walk from the restaurant, built for four guests each with king beds and single beds, kitchenettes, and fireplaces. They put you within two hundred meters of Kleinbaai harbour, where boats leave daily for shark cage diving and whale watching. The restaurant arranges these excursions along with visits to the African Penguin & Seabird Sanctuary.

The whale skeleton is why people come — it fills the dining room with the scale of the marine life just offshore, where southern rights still pass each year.