Stellski Café and Coffee Bar

  

18 February 2022

 

 

STELLSKI CAFÉ & COFFEE BAR 

24 Salisbury Street (corner of Fairview Avenue), Woodstock

 

If you’re young and hip, love working away from home on your MacBook, live in and around Woodstock, appreciate the fine line between funky and low budgie and could do with generous amounts of coffee, and acceptable food, Stellski will tick an elegant sufficiency of boxes.

 

The locale used to be a corner shop in what looks like a desirable residential neighbourhood, and its basic design style of simple metal framed chairs and tables and polished cement floor is bathed in a generous measure of natural light from windows on two sides. The interior is not palatial but spacious enough to accommodate three round and three square tables, with banquette seating against the rear wall, below all manner of artful, fussy decoration, and at the Salisbury Street window. There is counter seating facing Fairview Avenue and four or five tables on the Salisbury Street pavement.

 

This morning the outside tables were taken mostly by groups of friends enjoying a Kaffeeklatsch and the working individuals sat inside, mostly equipped with MacBooks although there was one brave soul with a PC laptop (but I think he also had a MacBook in his backpack, that he kept out of sight most of the time) and isolating themselves from the throng with earphones.

 

The playlist on the PA is heavy on Sixties and Seventies rock, R & B/soul and reggae, with the odd digression into the Eighties and even early years of the 21^st century. No amapiano mixes. Either hipsters prefer the playback from way back over more contemporary grooves, or the owner plays whatever turns them on, or, now that I think about it, the people who work with earphones on, do not care about the music in the background. 

 

There’s a wood burning cast iron stove in the one corner for cold, wet winter’s days, which must make Stellski an all year round cosy destination.

 

The all-day breakfast options are limited. There are two health bowls, a light fry up, avocado on toast, French toast, berry pancakes, omelette and filled croissants.

 

Surprisingly, for a café like this in this neighbourhood, Stellski’s not vegan, though one can order milk alternatives and there are healthy juice mixes and smoothies.

 

Seeing as how there is nothing exotic on the menu, I thought I’d have a fry up for a change and chose “the classic” (R68) which consists of two slices of toasted sourdough bread, two fried eggs (you can also have them poached or scrambled), four rashers of streaky bacon and roasted baby tomato halves.  

 

One can’t truthfully sing the euphoric praises of this kind of dish. It was well-cooked but is workmanlike and the type of thing one can cook at home, just as well or better.

 

Pro tip: roasted sourdough is extremely difficult to cut with a blunt knife.

 

I was told the pain au chocolat was sold out and I finished with a rather large slice of carrot cake (R45) that was delicious but on the cusp of being dry. I don’t know whether this was by design or whether the cake was a tad old; it would be harsh to say that the crumb was dry, but the moisture content was low, and it sure wasn’t as moist as I’m used to with the really good stuff.

 

The really good news is that Stellski is abundantly generous with its coffee: a full cup of espresso (R22)

and probably half a litre of flat white (R28).

With the latter, one can linger all day over a single cup.

 

I was by far the oldest person on the premises and I kinda gawked at the representatives of the generation that have no time for the patriarchy but have same penchant for hanging in cafés  as I have. It’s as if the archetypes have not outwardly materially  changed over the last 36 years.

 

Stellski also operates coffee bars at the Neighbourgoods Market at the Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock, and in Loop Street.