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A small place,
on a quiet road.
We opened in 2011. Twelve years in, the bread is better, the menu is shorter and the people who started with us are mostly still here.
Anna & Boetie Pretorius
A baker, a cook,
and two very small boys.
Anna grew up in a baker's family in Tulbagh. Boetie cooked his way through restaurants in Cape Town and Stellenbosch before deciding he was done with restaurants. We met at a long-table lunch in Riebeek Kasteel in 2009.
We moved to Napier in late 2010 because we wanted a smaller place to raise a family, and a smaller place to cook in. We found a sheep shed on the R316, four months of building permits and one very good neighbour who lent us his oven for the first six weeks.
We have two boys now, eight and six, who do the chalkboard sign in the morning and occasionally help knead.
Anna & Boetie
Briefly
Thirteen years,
in five lines.
Open on a Friday in March, in a tin-roofed shed on the Bredasdorp road. One oven, six tables, a hand-painted sign. Anna does the bread; Boetie does the lunch.
The kitchen extension goes on the back. We hire Lerato to help with the lunch service. Sunday roast starts as a one-off and never stops.
Second oven. The pantry shelves go up along the north wall. Liesbet starts dropping cheese on Thursdays.
Hard lockdown. We start the bread-box delivery to keep the team paid. Half our regulars haven't stopped ordering since.
Three ovens, twenty-two tables, six full-time staff, sixty-four covers on a Sunday. The sign needs repainting.
A few quiet rules
What we try to do.
Bake every day. The bread is the whole reason. Without the bread, everything else is just a kitchen.
Buy from the people we know by name. Smaller suppliers, shorter chains, fresher ingredients.
Cook what we actually want to eat. If we wouldn't feed it to our own children, it doesn't go on the menu.
In the kitchen
A short menu,
made well.
We cook a small menu, on purpose. Six breakfast plates, six lunch plates, the roast on Sundays, a few cakes. Less choice for the guest means more attention from the kitchen.
Almost everything is made from scratch in our kitchen. The bread is ours. The pastry is ours. The pies, the jams we sell, the dressings, the granola. We buy the meat, the cheese, the flour, the honey, the oil. We buy them from people we know.
- Six in the kitchen full-time
- Three ovens (one wood-fired, the others gas)
- Sourdough mixed daily, no commercial yeast
- Pies and pastry made fresh, every morning
The team
A small team,
mostly here for a while.
Six full-time, three more on weekends. Four have been with us five years or more.
Anna Pretorius
Baker / owner
Boetie Pretorius
Cook / owner
Lerato Modise
Head of kitchen
Riana Witbooi
Front of house
Sipho Madonsela
Bread & pastry
Pieter Booysen
Saturday roast