Bountiful bagel breakfast at Mill Coffee House

 14 September 2026

MILL COFFEE HOUSE

132 Dorp Street, Stellenbosch

My previous excursion to Stellenbosch was on a warm day but today it’s cold and wet, a throwback to what winter is supposed to be like around here, yet many tourists are wandering around the CBD, dressed in Spring-appropriate apparel with the odd puffer jacket as protection.

I too was out and about in the drizzle, dressed like a local savvy to the vicissitudes of  our fickle weather, on a long, winding perambulation, one the one hand searching for a decent breakfast spot and on the other hand simply to see what’s shaking. There seems to be more empty commercial spaces than I recall; a few places where I’d eaten as recently as last year are no longer in business.

Apropos my reent comments about eateries being glorified internet cafés, I popped into the  Bootlegger outlet on Van Ryneveld Street, walked to the back, turned around and left the premises because there was no open table. A small contingent of patrons were on R & R but the majority of tables were occupied by a person with a MacBook. I had mine with me but there was no space for me.

I carried on wandering and wondering where I would be able to have crust until I reached the Mill Coffee House, on the corner of Mill and Dorp Streets. When I was a kid, this space was the Akropolis Café,  a typical “corner caf” of the time. 

Now it’s a funky little coffee shop with white melamine fur4niture on wooden floor boards, all manner of decorative odds and ends and a colourful,  laminated, multi-page menu with the (almost mandatory) erroneous use of the apostrophe to indicate a plural and something called a breakfast chilly wrap, presumably for those unbearably hot summer days in the Boland.  

The breakfast choices are varied enough to suit any palate without offering anything particularly exciting. There is also a good variety of vegetarian and vegan options though.

The long walk didn’t boost my appetited and there was nothing much on offer that tempted me, so I took the easy way out and had the simple salmon and cream cheese bagel (R115), an espresso (R32) and an Americano (quantified as 350ml on the bill) (R44).

It’s one of those situations where you look at the item on your plate and wonder whether it’s really worth the money. Once, in a dim, distant past one would’ve had some kind of garnish to uphold the illusion that restauranteurs make an effort.  The bagel might as well have been brought to me wrapped in paper rather than being plated.

The New York Bagels version of the cream cheese and lox bagel is one of the favourite things in my life and it’s probably unfair to judge other bagels by that standard but all I can say for the Mill Coffee House bagel is that it’s serviceable and inoffensive though the texture of the bagel is closer to that of a soft, bagel-shape bun than a bagel with a crisp crust. 

This rather basic breakfast was R191,00 before tip. The coffee is proportionally quite expensive without being special either.

Even here, the MacBook brigade had a show of strength. I was one of three slightly older guys tapping away at keyboards. Home wi-fi in Stellenbosch must be an almost unaffordable luxury or have poor bandwidth.