Wild night in the Karoo village that won’t let you go

One of the two dining rooms of Die Richmond Supper Klub. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

21 Feb 2025

Richmond, Northern Cape, holds the Karoo’s pumping heart. It has an ethereal ability to bewitch you and hold you there, yet is so small that you could easily speed past without noticing it at all.

All roads lead to Richmond, when you’re coursing through the Karoo in your shiny city steed. Signs saying “Richmond” with an arrow appear on almost every road, tar or gravel. In your mind’s eye, the gleaming cars rolling along them today dissemble and reform into creaking wagons cutting their trails into Langenhoven’s earth, shaking the bones of their passengers along rocky roads on their way to nagmaal innie dorp.

When they reach Richmond, they clatter to their halt outside Number 40 Loop Street and traipse inside with their stern top hats, prim kappies and stiff legs. The wagon dissembles as you pull up in your blue Toyota Cross, dismounting not to enter for the nagmaal, but to join a party to herald a scene that the people of old would not recognise.

Today, 40 Loop Street is Die Richmond Supper Klub, which after years of traipsing along at an ox wagon’s pace has revved the engines to do something few small town restaurants ever do — open seven days a week. And it’s working. When Peter and Elizabeth Baker bought it, it was an abandoned house painted sky blue. Now everything he owns seems to line every wall and space between, with stables out back having been turned into a funky wine cellar.

The stoep of the Richmond Supper Klub. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

To reach Richmond this time, we drive via Graaff-Reinet, having started out in Nieu-Bethesda, just because we were there to eat Barbara Weitz’s extraordinary food. She has suggested we have breakfast either at Hey You or Maria’s Coffee in the Stellenbosch of the Karoo. We choose Hey You and it’s an excellent recommendation. I order shakshuka — sweet and sour beef mince, wilted spinach topped with perfectly poached eggs and yoghurt. I’m well set up for the drive.

Shakshuka at Hey You in Graaff-Reinet. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

We cruise past the voluptuous mountain bosoms of the Three Sisters; they shift and turn as you go by, one obscuring another, then the second obscuring the first until all three have played their ancient game with you, giggling into their chins as you disappear out of their sight. They’re the Tannie Kappies of the North Cape — they’ve seen everything from the rumbling ox wagons to the manganese trucks spewing diesel up their nostrils. Sometimes they just sigh and mutter under their breath.

Richmond always appears out of nowhere, as if it’s never really there but reveals itself on a whim. Ah look, there are people, let’s invite them in. We find the Kliphuijs, where its owner Jan Sauer has invited us to stay. He’s a Northern Cape man who a lot of people have taken note of, with his acquisition of several historic places and his rich, colourful eye for decor. Take a look at one room of Life Cottage, the house we were staying in, and you may repeat my sharp intake of breath on first entering.

A bedroom at Life Cottage in Loop Street, Richmond. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

But we don’t linger, because I want to take some photos inside Die Richmond Supper Klub before the crowds amble in for the launch party. Peter Baker, a Canadian in his mid 70s but as vital as a Springbok flyhalf, is there to make me feel at home and after too many whiskys much later possibly move to Richmond. Three years ago he’d asked me to do just that, to run this very restaurant with him, and I turned him down. What was I thinking.

In real life he’s a Joburg veterinarian, but when in Richmond he’s mein host, pizza man, amiable wiseguy and innuendo-dripping joker. I take an instant liking to him — I’m drawn to rebels and vagabonds — and can see why book dude Darryl David got involved with him to run their famous Booktown Richmond festivals. The supper club is where that happens.

Die Richmond Supper Klub. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

Peter walks me into The Generals’ Room, a combination of library (he collects books and a slew of other things) and gallery. And lounge.

“Yeah, the Generals’ Room just came about as I plastered more and more of my collection of historical stuff, and it just so happened that I had a good few pictures around — Smuts, DeWet, Botha, Scheepers in a British hospital bed recovering from an illness until he was strong enough to stand before a firing squad — De la Rey, Kruger, whose picture is juxtaposed next to his arch-enemy, Cecil Rhodes.”

“I keep my South African-related library in the Generals’ Room. There are several Zulu Wars paintings. I collect lots of stuff, from books to railroads’ lamps to flags.”

Peter Baker framed in the doorway of the Generals’ Room (Photo: Tony Jackman)

Suddenly, back in the bar, there’s a tall woman coming squarely through the door. She’s weirdly familiar but I cannot think why, until Pete says, “Tony, have you met Lientjie?”

I had not expected Lientjie Wessels, artist and chef, to be so tall. We had spoken in WhatsApps and phone calls when I ran a piece on her last year, but we’d never met. Long in Cullinan up in the mysterious North, she now lives in Richmond and dips in and out of Peter’s business and kitchen at times that suit her and Peter.

For the launch she has made dips and breads and intriguing toppings for Pete’s beloved pizzas. She steers me into the kitchen and pours me a slug of her fig wine — a remarkably figgy dessert wine (she says aperitif, and it is served to guests on arrival outside) — and a taste of her “Karoo za’atar”, which later is sprinkled on pizza.

Lientjie had wanted to buy the place, but Peter wasn’t selling.

Lientjie Wessels and Peter Baker. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

“She’s gonna be a sort of adjunct, float in, float out. Her cooking is different, funky. I think once a month it will be great to have a guest chef come in, we’re open to guest chefs such as yourself (I think he means me). The offer’s open to anyone who wants to cook real good food for a good clientele in a really funky little spot in the middle of buttfuck nowhere.”

Much of the food action has always been around the pizza oven he had built way back, at a height that he could manage. But lately he’s felt the need to open full time. He found a chef, Gary Hattingh, whom he’d known as a kid (Gary, not Peter) and is now 50 or thereabouts. Gary is highly versatile. In addition to the menu, he’ll ask customers what they fancy eating, and rustle something up to suit them.

But my whirlwind introduction to Peter Baker’s world needs to be paused for now; it’s only 5pm and a long night awaits.

In Life Cottage, I photograph everything in sight.

The lounge at Life Cottage in Loop Street, Richmond. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

Back home, I WhatsApp Jan Sauer whose cottages these are, and whose vision they are, and whose canvas they are, and he tells me they “were flattered to have such distinguished guests at our establishment”. (No idea who he meant, they must have left before we checked in.)

We dine that evening on the stoep at the Kliphuijs, the main space of the operation. The food is excellent, skaapstertjies, tender lamb chops, served on their own eccentric crockery made on Sweetfontein farm. But more about all that later in the year — I’ll be visiting his various Northern Cape operations.

It’s a party at Die Richmond Supper Klub when we get back. A few nibbles of Pete’s great pizzas are enjoyed, and bread is draped in Lientjie’s za’atar-dressed dips and whatnots. Locals are doing what Karoo types do on their stoeps. Somehow, along the way, I glean the Peter Baker story. He and Elizabeth first came to Richmond in early 2002.

Tables are spread with delicious food outside Die Richmond Supper Klub. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

“Our kids went to school in Stellenbosch. It was a halfway stop and we got friendly with guest house owners and ended up buying a house, which we lived in, and really loved it.”

They’d bought the house to be close to a couple they knew well, but within six months, both died. Suddenly they didn’t know anybody in Richmond.

One of the two dining rooms of Die Richmond Supper Klub. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

“I became very friendly with their son and I decided I’m going to open a supper club, a private dining house for him and his friends, all being sheep farmers — overweight, high cholesterol, high blood pressure. Teach them to eat food that was green and yellow and crunchy and grew in the ground.

“And it was a war of attrition. We’d give them beautiful food which we cooked ourselves and we’d bring my kids down and friends down. Elizabeth and myself would cook. They’d eat our food but they wouldn’t eat the green stuff. (Over the years they did.)”

They set up an ecumenical venture with an American outfit in a little Maryland town that became Hope in Richmond. Hiring “two coloured ladies who were excellent cooks”, they made soup, feeding 250 kids a day. A “feeding ventre” grew out of it, and it’s still going.

Die Richmond Supper Klub, meanwhile, served “basic food” — steaks, chops, ribs, spaghetti, soups, stews, “basic plaaskos”. Peter’s droll humour kicks in: “We went through a string of other operators, the chefs were either kleptomaniacs, sex maniacs, drunks, paedophiles, wife beaters, thieves and incompetent alcoholics or drug addicts, but usually it was a combination of them all.

“So we eventually just closed it, it became too much hassle, and we only opened it during our book fair when I would get chefs from Capsicum (Culinary Studio), who have been supporting us for the last 10, 12 years, and they would send a head chef down with half a dozen chef students and they would cook and the food would be really good. Everyone was saying, ‘Why aren’t you open all year round?’.”

Now you can pull in for supper and a drink or four whenever you’re passing by on the N1 and need a night’s break.

In the bar, elbows bend, drinks are poured, tongues wag. There are broadly drawn Karoo people here. There’s this common understanding we all have, the eye-to-eye of knowing the Karoo having left the city. It cannot be bought or borrowed.

There’s gossip and stories, hilarious jokes and the singing of songs. I may or may not have initiated a sort of Request Hour (or two) and it’s not entirely beyond the realms of possibility that one may have done one’s Dylan and Bee Gees impersonations (you didn’t know that). Peter Baker is a very bad man when it comes to pouring whisky.

But now I have to pour myself back into the street, back into Life Cottage, and into bed. DM

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