‘Some of our quirkiness just went missing’: Breakfast with Johke Steenkamp
Over spiced avo toast, the self-taught vegan chef and the ‘runt’ in Grumpy & Runt talks about the triumphant return of the plant-based donut and deli sandwich shop, opening in Cape Town today
Between Us is one of my favourite restaurants in Cape Town and I’ve eaten many lunches and dinners there, but never breakfast. So when I turn up at 7.50am, the staff are still setting up and I have free rein to pick my favourite table: a two-seater alongside a large wooden-framed window that borders the terrace, affording great views from both seats.
I’m meeting Johke Steenkamp whom I first interviewed four years ago when she and her business and personal partner, Carla Gontier, opened a matchbox deli and donut shop on one of Cape Town’s quaintest commercial squares (that story in the archive section below).
Since then, Grumpy & Runt moved locations twice and then shut up shop, Steenkamp gave birth to a daughter who is now two, and Gontier is back in advertising at Point Iconic.
“I knew in my head that this would be a potential reality, but I didn’t realise how hard it would hit me,” Steenkamp says, adding that she was “absolutely wrecked” when the business closed, seemingly permanently, in June.
“We weren’t just a business. We meant a lot to a lot of people. And I know this because people often shared their amazing stories with me. We were a part of people’s engagements, we were part of people’s weddings, their baby showers, so many first dates.
“It just made me sad to take that away and also to see that so many of the vegan places were closing. It was such a big part of my life and I felt like it wasn’t finished. It was like the worst break-up of my life.”
‘After we closed, almost every vegan business reached out to me to say sorry and to offer us support, and that was really touching’
Steenkamp continued cooking for private clients and working on a few food projects while selling all the leftover bits and pieces from the shop in her garage, except for the donut fryer and a few of the display items – a “what if” save.
Then she got a call from Trent Pike, co-founder and CEO of South African plant-based food products company Oh Oat and ditto. “We always had a really good relationship with Trent, from the start actually. We just connected,” she says.
He offered to meet for coffee and then some, pitching a collaboration: a managerial role for Steenkamp in ditto – an ice cream parlour and waffle house on Kloof Street in Cape Town – as well as the section of ditto formerly functioning exclusively as the scooping and cone-making counter for the ice cream parlour in which to re-open Grumpy & Runt.
“At this point I’ve put myself through this mourning process and I said to him, I don’t think I can do this again.” So he invited her to make a list of everything that had caused her stress in running G&R: everything she hated, couldn’t deal with and didn’t enjoy, which she duly did. “He had a solution for every single thing.”
“He made us an offer and we took a long time to think about it. I ended up deciding we weren’t going to do it, that it wasn’t good for me and I needed to move on with my life,” Steenkamp recounts. “And I went to see him to tell him this, and the second I walked in there I changed my mind.”
G&R will now plug into the ditto ecosystem. Using the same staff and the same point of sale, the two businesses will combine to form what Steenkamp describes as a “vegan food court”.
“They did a full prediction of what our business could look like together and they presented this thing to us of: this is where you are now, this is where you need to be, and here’s how we can get you there,” she says.
G&R will benefit from ditto’s “streamlined and seamless systems” in ordering, stocking, sourcing supplies and raw ingredients, deliveries, finance and HR, as well as the ditto retail range and the use of its factory, not to mention the support and backing of a like-minded brand.
ditto will benefit from Steenkamp’s culinary inventiveness and Gontier’s marketing nous. They’ll also get G&R’s mad popular donuts to add to the ditto dessert mix, and the accompanying foot flow from their devoted donut buyers, as well as the addition of an established and popular savoury menu.
ditto, the store, acts as a showroom for the ditto retail ice cream range, made from the company’s Oh Oat milk; the house-made waffles as a vehicle to present the ice cream. Now there could be the prospect of donut ice cream sandwiches too. “There are so many ways for us to work together but still stay strong within our own brands,” she says.
Apart from G&R’s signature gigantic donuts rolling back onto the production line, G&R devotees will be delighted to know that the original sandwich and hot items menu is coming back too: the not-chicken mayo, the not-chicken crunch, Reuben, Cubano. While the meatball sub and my personal favourite, the “choona”, will rotate as specials. And ditto is adding a couple of hash brown savoury waffles to the menu.
‘We’re bringing back all the favourites’
The donut range will run in the same way as before: four to seven flavours will change weekly to every 10 days. Some of the food will be made in-house but G&R now also has access to Oh Oat’s factory, so the seitan used for the sandwiches can be produced there and sent to the shop as needed, as well as the cakes and cookies baked for donut toppings.
When our food arrives, Steenkamp’s breakfast looks a little meagre: it is heaped with slices of avocado, but it’s just one long piece of Danish rye. She usually doesn’t eat breakfast at all though, snacking on the offcut crusts from her daughter’s packed lunch instead.
“It’s delicious, these chives and this spicy little mix,” she says, of the Za’atar sprinkled on top. Mine features a slice of the same hot smoked salmon that plays a starring role in my favourite dish on the Between Us lunch menu.
The original G&R in Dunkley Square was open for four years. But ever-increasing overheads and the difficulties of operating in a heritage building made staying open there untenable. And when Murray Clark, the man behind Neighbourgood and a friend of Steenkamp and Gontier’s, offered them premises in the Cape Town city centre in October last year, they took it.
The production space there was “incredible”, Steenkamp says, and they complemented the sleek, industrial interior with stylish tables and chairs. “So everything worked really well but something was missing. It was like the heart of Grumpy & Runt, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t get it in there. People liked our messed-up old tables outside at Dunkley Square and sitting under the trees. Some of our quirkiness just went missing.
“We also lost our regulars because they wanted to be somewhere cosy and Dunkley Square-ish. We saw them sometimes, on weekends, and we still had such nice support which I’m so grateful for. People donated to our crowdfunding, which was so sweet. But it just wasn’t enough and we were still trying to recover from debt we had from Dunkley Square.”
Steenkamp says that the new location depended a lot more on foot traffic as parking in that area is so problematic. And their new office worker clientele was “a more sceptical audience”.
“They were almost, like, what is the point of this? They didn’t necessarily come looking for an artisanal vegan product. Not even vegan – they didn’t come looking for an artisanal product. They wanted a cheap, Krispy Kreme-style thing that they could grab and go. Before we had our following, and this was random people filtering in from different areas in town, and it just wasn’t as well received.
“And people complained all the time about our not taking cash, which has been a safety thing for us, specially at Dunkley Square. It’s a high risk environment we’re in in South Africa. I think lots of businesses sent petty cash with their staff.”
For those who know Cape Town well, the feel of Dunkley Square in the City Bowl and the feel of Loop Street in the city centre is quite different, and I ask her whether she anticipated any of these aspects when moving to a location seemingly incongruous with the quirky vibe of the business?
“Look, I knew it was a very big risk, but I still wanted to try to keep the business alive,” she says. “I was so tired at this point and I just said to Carla, I’m going to push as hard as I can because I can’t imagine it not being there. And I almost felt like we didn’t have anywhere else to turn, and I felt very safe with Murray on our side because he was sort of protecting us. From the beginning he said, you can have the difficult conversations with me. I can’t imagine a better landlord than him actually.
“And, honestly, it was pretty cool there, but ultimately I think we reached the point where our overheads were always too high. The price of oil, icing sugar – things almost doubled from when we opened, and we can’t charge a fortune for our product. It’s already expensive.
“There were just so many challenges that if I think about it now, it’s not huge challenges, but if you’re just one person and you’re already strained and trying to pay off the debt and trying to manage things, it’s a tricky thing to do. I felt like I was in over my head,” she says, adding that all the while they continued to fulfil custom orders and bulk orders for film companies, corporate functions and weddings.
When Steenkamp told Clark they could no longer cope in the space he had offered them, he offered them another space near Parliament in the city centre, next to a popular office worker haunt called Bread Milk & Honey – a cafe I know well, its previous location a block away having been my go-to lunch spot when I worked at Independent Newspapers.
The new space was “tiny, like a shoebox”, she says, which was perfect to test an idea for a franchise model Steenkamp and Gontier were working on with Clark. “Murray said, we’ve got this microscopic location, why don’t you trial your grab ’n’ go concept from there.
“So that was such a relief for me. The rent was almost nothing. We could hardly fit our production in there but we managed, and we served through a window for a few months and I absolutely loved it. It was the cutest fricking space.
“And we actually did okay there but there’s only so much you can sell from a tiny hatch. If you don’t have a lot of them, it’s almost not worth it unless you have hectic foot traffic, which you don’t have in that area.”
While researching a franchise model and meeting with investors, Steenkamp and Gontier realised that as newbie bakery owners, they had been paying too much for everything. Their systems, to use Steenkamp’s terminology, were a bit aanmekaar geplak (Afrikaans for glued together, a patchwork).
In the hatch they were churning out up to 160 donuts a day. At its peak in Dunkley Square, they were producing more than 300 a day, sometimes up to 450 when the Vegan Goods Market was on and they had a wedding to cater – days Steenkamp recalls as “amazing chaos”.
The move to ditto will by all accounts reduce the chaos but retain the amazingness. Steenkamp and the ditto team have been training the staff, re-working the recipes and costing them. When G&R first opened, it was Steenkamp alone making the vegan donuts. The recipe and technique she developed is so closely guarded, it’s written in code.
For the past two years, she’s been making them with Anita, an employee she trained that the others call “Tony” and Steenkamp calls “my donut queen”. From now on though, with Steenkamp’s new managerial responsibilities, the donut queen will take over production. Steenkamp will still do all the creative work: “I’ll just go and have fun really.”
Grumpy & Runt opens this morning at 8am at 121 Kloof Street in Gardens, Cape Town. The official launch of the shop and its collaboration with ditto is on September 27.
Avo Danish rye R95
Herb frittata R175
Flat white/ decaf/ oat milk R53
Americano R34Total including tip: R400
From the archive
[Originally published in the Daily Maverick on 11 September, 2020]
The little plant-based deli that could
Small businesses face multiple hurdles, but having to close 17 days after launching due to a global pandemic is usually not one of them. Using lockdown to their advantage, however, the two founders of this small business have managed to attract a regular customer base hungry for its signature item: the doughnut.
“I made a child cry today,” says Grumpy & Runt co-owner Carla Gontier on the second day in her business’s six-month history that doughnuts failed to appear on the front counter. The first time it wasn’t clear what had happened but this time it was definitely loadshedding’s fault. The tiny tot in tears had arrived with her mom for one of the plant-based deli’s signature doughnuts and instead was served an important South African lesson: Eskom can ruin everyone’s day.
“I think gone are the days of just sprinkles on a doughnut,” Carla remarks, by way of itemising the flavours they’ve created that could make grown men weep: from South African-inspired milk tart, Malva pudding and coffee ’n’ rusk, to the salt, caramel and crushed Orbs doughnut, which featured bits of peppermint chocolate-covered chickpeas bobbing in the glaze to promote the launch of a product of one of their suppliers.
If they happen to eat a fantastic cookie, they’ll stick it on a doughnut. If they want a green doughnut, they’ll create an apple and lime combo. What’s seasonal fruit wise, what’s trending, what global brands are doing, what evokes the nostalgia of childhood are all contributing factors to a weekly selection of seven different doughnuts that always feature something brightly coloured, something chocolatey and often something peanut buttery.
“We want to smash all these things together,” says Carla. “We don’t always get it completely right,” adds co-owner Johke Steenkamp, the “runt” in Grumpy & Runt. Although Johke is the chef and developed the menu, they collaborate on doughnut flavours.
The menu in general pays homage to the stars of the traditional New York City deli with sandwiches inspired by the Reuben, the Cubano, the cheese and tomato. But G&R’s versions are entirely plant-based and, moreover, the butter, cheeses, meats and sauce equivalents – used to build their hulking sandwiches, subs, bagels and desserts – were developed from scratch by Johke who has zero formal training in food.
“I went vegan and I couldn’t find the things I wanted to taste,” she says. So she began experimenting with baked goods, figuring out egg replacements, proteins, textures and the recreation of flavours. Most of the figuring out came from studying non-vegan and vegan recipes, the latter which she came to enjoy “uncomplicating”.
Johke studied fine art at the University of Cape Town and Carla worked for years in advertising. Apart from being a shareholder in her last agency, neither had any experience starting or running a business. Carla combined the brand strategies and business plans she had put together in her advertising days for her small business clients.
There was “a lot of dumb luck and guesswork”, as well as a lot of Googling, asking friends, people in the industry and those who’d already done this sort of thing, and talking to tax consultants – “and just winging the rest of it.” The property they rent for the deli and kitchen they initially put an offer in to buy. It was rejected but a few months later they discovered the owner wanted to let it.
In April, during early lockdown, they hustled by temporarily assembling veggie boxes with produce from their supplier combined with sweet treats and sandwiches they contributed. But they weren’t set up for the logistics of doing drop-offs. So they put a stop to that and rather focused their energy on what the business could be when they opened again by refining the recipes, re-designing the menu and re-thinking the doughnuts.
At that stage there were 13 standard doughnuts on offer all the time – some simple, some wildly elaborate. Not knowing what the demand would be like when food delivery services would be allowed to operate under level 4, they downsized to seven doughnuts but changed the selection every week.
“We had loads of deliveries; we were really, really lucky,” says Carla. “And we had walk-ins as well ‘cos we had the deli side of things, so people could come in and buy things off the shelves.”
Having said that, some days orders were minimal and sales negligible. “There were definitely times when we were, like, shit, have we made the right move? I gave up my career, quite a well-paid job, to take a gamble during a global pandemic,” says Carla. “I think what got us through it was that everyone was in the same boat. I felt oddly calm.”
And then at the end of May something started happening on weekends, namely a line out the door. Carla attributes the seemingly sudden rush on doughnuts to a combination of factors. The vegan and plant-based community were posting about them, so their social media took off and piqued interest. Capetonians like checking out the new thing, she added. And, also, there was no other physical shop where people could swing past and pick up vegan doughnuts.
Where lockdown paradoxically wound up helping them was during the 6-9am window when people were finally allowed out to exercise. The storyboard artist who works upstairs from the deli noticed that people were walking past the building, smelling doughnuts and poking their heads around to see if they could get one.
G&R only opened at 9 but he suggested Carla and Johke do a coffee and doughnut special between 8 and 9. So they put out a sign offering coffee and a cinnamon sugar doughnut for R40 “and suddenly people were, like, ‘I’ll take one’,” says Carla.
“That, I think, kicked off the non-plant based community – people just liking doughnuts. And we still have those customers. So those people who used to go for their run and then get a doughnut have now kind of let go of the run part and are just coming for the doughnuts.”
Initially G&R was just going to be a doughnut shop. But on a research trip to NYC and Toronto they discovered that “doughnuts and sandwiches actually go really, really well together”. And, as it turns out, their take on the traditional chicken mayo sarmie – using a very light seitan made in-house with chickpea powder and a combination of several house-made spice mixes – is such an overwhelming hit that they joke they might as well just be a chicken mayo shop.
Each vegan doughnut sampled on their North American jaunt had a standout feature: some were light and fluffy, others moist and dense. Some were square, some were tiny and some were huge.
“That’s what we wanted to do: how do we stand out in some way? And I think our thing was just, like, massive doughnuts,” says Carla. “We were just playing,” adds Johke, “and we had a few and there was one that was really poofy by accident and Carla said, ‘This is great, we should make all of them like this’. It was crunchy and fluffy on the inside and it was fun to dip and ridiculous.”
“I felt if we could pull off something that’s sweet and delicious and have this aesthetic attached to it, we could probably create almost like a little world for people to go to,” Johke says. “In my head, it was either we make thousands of different cakes and treats everyday, or we do one thing really well and we do different toppings, so it’s like you have a hundred different versions of this one really good thing, and this becomes your signature thing.”
Even with one thing, the schedule of a baker is not for the faint-hearted. Johke is at her rolling and cutting station in the kitchen between 4.30 and 5am so the doughnuts have risen sufficiently for Carla to begin frying them at 6.30am. In between the rolling and cutting, Johke will get a glaze stand going at the back.
They’ve got a small fryer and only nine go in it at the same time, but they are getting one that can accommodate 24 at a time, so that’ll cut down the frying time from its current three hours. A batch yields between seven and nine doughnuts and each has to be fried for two minutes on each side. In the beginning, they made 30 doughnuts a day. Now, on Saturdays, that figure exceeds 250.
Carla and Johke have been dating for two years. They don’t live together yet, so this early-morning production period is their only certain opportunity for alone time – especially considering the rest of the day Johke is in the kitchen and Carla out front.
Being professional partners has had its advantages for their personal partnership. They’ve realised they can’t have a fight and storm off. Rather, learning how to resolve issues quickly so they can get back to working together has become the order of the day.
“Bad shit is gonna happen and you have to just be, like, well, that bad thing has happened, let’s move forward and see what we can do,” says Carla.
“I think it’s also bad shit’s gonna happen, but there’s no point taking it out on each other and that’s kind of what most people do; they immediately want to blame the other person,” Johke adds.
The couple met as students at university and were friends for a long time before they became involved. “We’ve known each other for so many years,” says Johke. “We used to party together. Now we don’t even drink.”
Giving up booze happened long before they started this business, but it’s a move that proved prescient considering bedtime these days is no later than 8.