This restaurant is a happy place, where workers aren’t exploited and honest homemade food pulls in the patrons
This is a love story. And it started by accident.
Nine years ago, at the beginning of a long weekend in August, Ansie van der Mescht was driving the front car in a convoy of jollers heading to the popular Oppikoppi outdoor music festival in Limpopo.
In the opposite direction, an out-of-control car came hurtling towards them. She just evaded it by veering off the road, but the car crashed into another one about five vehicles behind her.
When the dust had settled the convoy stopped at the KFC in the dorpie near Oppikoppi.
“It was all very dramatic,” Van der Mescht says over a wooden table at De Baba Eatery in Melville which she recently opened with her partner, who was in that same convoy. She is telling me about the first time they met. “We bonded over the trauma of that event.”
Although they noticed each other at Oppikoppi, the focus was on jolling. But then came the last day of the festival.
“I decided that I really liked him … On that Monday morning when we had to leave, I walked through the whole camp looking for him. And he walked through the whole camp looking for me.”
Numbers exchanged; they organised a date for a week later.
“But we didn’t even go on a date, we didn’t leave my house. He came over with a pizza and JR just never left.”
JR is Jean-René Onyangunga, who has been Van der Mescht’s life and business partner ever since.
They opened De Baba Eatery in February this year. It is an inviting place, with light streaming through large windows and brightly painted walls in sync with the red, yellow, orange, green, pink and blue wooden tables. People chat, drink coffee, brood over their laptops or cellphones and, of course, eat pastries, fresh-out-of-the-oven bread, hearty breakfasts and seductive cakes. You can’t resist, because the baking happens right here under your nose.
The self-taught Van der Mescht is clearly adept at multitasking.
“This one” — she points at a timer in front of her — “is a new croissant that I’m trying. It’s filled with a pesto, ricotta and roasted tomato.”
“I also have two cakes in the oven,” she says, which explains the second timer.
Van der Mescht talks about her beloved man’s unusual story. Onyangunga was born in Kinshasa — he was seven when his doctor father relocated their family to South Africa in 1991. They first settled in Potgietersrus (now Mokopane), but rightwing Afrikaners picketed outside the children’s primary school.
“They came from Kinshasa where everyone was black,” she says. “And then all of a sudden, they were thrust into this.”
Onyangunga’s father decided to move the family to Durban.
Van der Mescht grew up in Camperdown not too far from the coastal city. “So JR and I probably walked past each other on the Durban beachfront without knowing,” she says.
Both entrepreneurial, the couple opened their first shop two months into their relationship. It was a clothes shop near Joburg’s Market Theatre. Onyangunga has always been his own boss — his Dr Pachanga is known for its quirky, African-inspired clothes.
Van der Mescht was working as a chief financial officer for a small medical company, but would go home after work and bake for markets on Saturdays. By 2018, she quit and joined Dr Pachanga, while continuing with the baking as well.
But then Covid happened.
“I thought, shit, we worked for the same company, both of us, so now we’re screwed. While we were waiting for restrictions to lift, I was baking, and I was learning.”
When the restrictions eased, it was back to the markets for her, and to the clothing business for him.
“But markets are very exhausting, and I think many times you just break even,” she says.
When this space opened, just a few streets away from their Melville home, there was no hesitation.
“I think people give Melville an unnecessary hard time — we used to trade in Parkhurst, which actually is much more dangerous than Melville,” Van der Mescht says. “I’ve also always liked the people here … a diverse crowd.
“From a business perspective, the rental here is also much better.”
De Baba has 14 staffers, from chefs to waiters, scullers to bakers. It is a happy place, but also an educational environment for everyone, including Van der Mescht.
“The guys in the kitchen asked me to buy brisket. They then researched how to smoke it. We ordered the wood.
“They smoked it, and we had a special last Saturday — it sold out in the first hour. They were also incredibly happy, because they didn’t do this in other places. So it’s nice to have people who are interested, and we all try different things.”
Van der Mescht says the hospitality industry can be exploitative.
“Many of our staff have come from places where they work 10- to 12-hour shifts for six days a week. No one here works more than 50 hours a week — it’s not allowed here.”
She says they use good ingredients and make everything themselves, from the pastry sheets to the mayonnaise, the condiments to the caramel. “It just tastes better.”
Van der Mescht gets inspiration from her grandparents: her oupa had fruit trees on their smallholding in Hennenman in the Free State.
“And everything from those trees landed in a bottle somewhere in my grandmother’s kitchen.
“It is honest, you know. And it’s much better than what people are being sold now.”
Onyangunga and Van der Mescht’s love story has grown with their business.
“I really love working with JR, because it makes sense to work with your partner,” she says. “Because in an ideal world we should at least share some of the same goals, and so when we wake up in the mornings, I can trust that we’re waking up for the same reason.”
The second timer is beeping, and it is time for the cakes to come out of the oven. It is also time for me to say goodbye before I succumb to any of the many sweet temptations.