The Mill & Press Café

 10 June 2022

 

The Mill & Press Café 

Mason’s Press Building, Woodlands Road, Woodstock, Cape Town

 

The empty hide, so to speak, as one can’t rally call an empty space a skeleton, I guess, of  Bones is still visible at The Palms Centre in Woodstock, mute testimony to the fact that even the once most reviewed restaurant on this group couldn’t survive lockdown.

 

I visited The Palms Centre in Woodstock  to buy something, thinking I could have a bite of breakfast at Sharon’s Café, which was ostensibly open but, at around 10h00, the kitchen wasn’t yet functional and the offer of coffee and a croissant wasn’t appealing enough. The only other option was Seattle Coffee Co, not my idea of a breakfast spot either, so I hailed an Uber to The Mill & Press Café.   I’d seen it mentioned on google searches and was sufficiently curious to put in on the shortlist for further investigation.

 

The immediate vicinity of the building seems to be a revitalised section of a light industrial neighbourhood in Woodstock, cheek to jowl with residential streets, that is still striving for mor improvement.  

 

The café is on the concourse level of a repurposed industrial building,  now hosting all manner of endeavours with funky names that suggest a gig economy worker bee demographic of millennial and generation Z.

 

The exoskeleton of the original factory environment has been retained for extra grit and a conceptual reminder of the origins of the  place, with a highly polished, dark  cement floor and 7 tables with bench seating inside, and one small table and counter seating on the small stoep outside the entrance. The service counter is of blonde wood and there is a bare brick wall behind it for atmosphere.

 

The space is well lit,  with electric light and high, industrial style  windows and this mitigates the works canteen vibe.

 

The breakfast menu is on two blackboards behind the service counter, far too small for me to read. The solution was to photograph the wall and retire to a nearby table to enlarge the image and study the options. I know this is my personal quibble because I don’t see good, but is it too much to ask to have just a simple printed menu? Perhaps the plan is to have plats du jour, hence the blackboard, and perhaps it’s for quirky effect but I feel helpless when I can’t read a menu against a wall.

 

I chose the breakfast wrap with crisp bacon, creamy scrambled eggs and a whiff of chilli, very nice, if petite. Neatly wrapped in brown paper en served on a wooden board. (R82)

 

The espresso (R22) wasn’t very generous, but the Americano(R26)  was. The coffee supplier is Deluxe, not my favourite roastery, but their product is good.

 

Service was friendly and efficient.

 

The bill came to E138,00 (including a Chelsea bun for R18) before tip.

 

The Mill & Press Café is obviously intended to serve whoever works in the building and surrounding area and isn’t worth making an effort to get to, for the menu is as spartan as the seating, but if I were to extrapolate from the breakfast wrap, the food would be good and freshly made, the atmosphere doesn’t suck and the coffee is decently priced.

 

Incongruously, given the age of the average patron around here, the soundtrack  was firmly based in the late ‘60s and ‘70s of the previous century, a time long before the target demographic was born.