5 minute read
Windhoek's favourite bakery
Hidden behind the unlikely facade of a Puma service station in General Murtala Muhammed Road in Windhoek’s Eros neighbourhood is the city’s most loved artisan bakery. Don’t be fooled by the exterior. As soon as you enter Le Pain Café your senses are bombarded with the smell of fresh bread, pastries and the aroma of freshly made coffee. The popularity of this place has spread quickly through word of mouth, and for good reason. Once you have tasted the delicious baked delicacies like the pecan nut mini pies, various tartlets and old favourites on the shelves like the signature loaf or the peppadew and feta ciabatta, it's hard not to come back for more.
While a lot of kids say they want to become firemen or doctors when asked what they want to be when they grow up, the owner and founder of Le Pain Café, Stéphaan Coetzee, seems to have had it all worked out from a young age. “It all started when I was about nine years old and told my parents that I want to open a bakery in Paris. I didn’t even know where Paris was at that time,” he explains laughingly.
The dream to become a baker never left him and after finishing school he enrolled at the Institute of Culinary Arts in Stellenbosch, South Africa. While studying there the co-owner and co-founder of île de païn bakery in Knysna, Markus Färbinger, gave a talk to the students and Stéphaan was intrigued by what he said about artisan bread. So much so that as part of his course, he secured a three-month internship with Markus at île de païn, and this is where he really fell in love with the whole process of baking and all the intricacies that go with it. After finishing his studies he worked for Markus for about two years, constantly learning and slowly perfecting his craft.
After a stint in a pastry department in the UK and then going back to South Africa to work for one of the country’s bestknown chefs, David Higgs, Stéphaan returned to Namibia with the intention to start his own bakery. His dream didn’t instantly materialise, however. He worked in the construction industry for five years before his family acquired the Puma service station where he was able to open his bakery.
Now, seven years later, Stéphaan muses over the humble beginnings of the bakery. “I was the only one working in the bakery and our total daily production started with 20 Brötchen (bread rolls), two baguettes and one or two signature loaves.” As with any business, success doesn’tcome overnight, and after a couple of months of having bread left over every day, there were doubts about the viability of the bakery. Everything changed around six months after opening. The turning point came when one weekend a hundred Brötchen were ordered. From then on word of mouth started spreading and business picked up. Today Le Pain Café has a substantially larger output and has gone far from the days when it was only Stéphaan baking bread. The bakery is in operation from 06:00 to 16:00 every day with a staff of nine, while the kitchen has five and front of house three employees.
Apart from mixing the dough, everything is shaped by hand before it is baked, and all the products on the shelves are
freshly baked each day. Stéphaan attributes the reason for the popularity of his bread to the way it is made according to traditional methods which give it a crust and flavour. “It’s a passion that is difficult to explain but if you understand what bread really is and you understand the process that it goes through, how it constantly changes and how hard we have to work every day to get it on the shelves, then you’ll understand the love for it,” says Stéphaan.
“It is hard work but the whole bakery is built on a passion and love for the process. Our success lies in the process and the product. We bake bread like a Michelin star restaurant would make a plate of food. It is important that the quality stays high, and what sets us apart is the effort we put in. Our returning customers are proof of that.”
The passion that goes into all of Le Pain Café’s products is evident when speaking to its customers. Some of them make daily pilgrimages across town for a filled ciabatta or a bacon, egg and cheese English muffin. Next time you are in Windhoek, be sure you visit and see what all the hype is about.
