Dream café is a brewing success
Richmond Studio Café hosts events and photography workshops
KEVIN RITCHIE
NOT SO long ago, Antoine de Ras’s photographs would have been splashed the width of the front pages of some of the finest newspapers in South Africa. These days you’re more likely to find him mixing and mingling over a coffee at the Richmond Studio Café.
The coffee shop’s a dream that came true.
“I’d owned the flat upstairs for 14 years and was always interested in buying the unit below which was actually a stationery store for architects,” De Ras said.
“When it came up for sale in 2014, I jumped at the opportunity. I used it mostly as a studio space and where I parked my motorbike collection for a while.”
At the time, De Ras was working as a senior photographer for The Star, where within two years he would announce his presence on the local scene by winning Story of the Year in the Standard Bank Sikuvile Awards in 2009 for his coverage of the xenophobia that gripped the country – and then going one better and being named Journalist of the Year in 2014, once again beating all the reporters and writers to the title, this time with a picture of Oscar Pistorius in court that looked more like a painting by a Renaissance Old Master.
In-between chasing local assignments, taking leave and selffunding himself to cover the Arab Spring in Egypt, Syria and Libya, he dreamt of having an espresso barcum-studio while he lived upstairs in his flat. He got his chance in 2016. The Star restructured its editorial operations and he ended his 10-year association with the paper and used the opportunity to turn his dream into a reality – except it would take an entire year.
He gutted the unit, ripping out the carpets to reveal the original Rhodesian teak parquet, which he relaid, bought the studio flat next door to incorporate as a kitchen and then set about making the dream real: a retro industrial design with some vintage elements, infused throughout with his love for photography, from the old Kodak colour slides used as an inlay in the door that leads to the bathrooms to the old newspaper press wheels repurposed as door handles on the doors he made to the kitchen.
As an avid collector of collectibles, from antique motorcycles to old cameras, vinyl records and even a 1950s copper fan, he salvaged the wooden parquet from the late lamented Bohemian nearby and used it to clad the pillars in his café.
“It turned out exactly as I had dreamt it.”
There are pictures hanging on the walls that he changes regularly. One of them is the one that won him third place in Picture of the Year in 2012 after his return from the Arab Spring. On the opposite wall is a pillar of Polaroid snaps, all hand captioned in ink, taken as a living memento every time the café hosts a memorable event.
The menu, too, is a far cry from those heady days in November 2017 when the Richmond Studio Café opened its doors.
“We didn’t have a cook until 10 days before, when I bumped into someone I knew in Melville who told me they had a great guy who needed work and they could only give him a day a week.”
Mike Nkomo has been there ever since, although his repertoire extends far beyond the toasted sandwiches De Ras had originally envisaged.
“I owe a lot to Emily Dyer from the Kitchen Think. My cousin is a chef and he told me to get a decent accountant – someone like Emily. She came in when it was an empty shell, helped design the menu and helped us manoeuvre from the back office to point of sale.”
One of her legacies is the regular overhauling of the menus, which are dramatically evolved from a range of basic toasted sandwiches and coffee to a full breakfast menu and separate lunch and dinner menus – and a takeaway one too.
The thrust of the business has changed too.
“We can’t just rely on walk-in trade, so we’ve branched out into events too; book launches like Deon Maas’s most recent book. Jeez, they finished all the liquor in the shop,” he said.
The studio café can accommodate 55 to 60 people for events inside – and when it’s warmer the event merely spills onto the sidewalks as it did last summer when journalist and DJ Charles Leonard was on the decks inside. It’s also open seven days a week now, from 6.30am to 8pm Tuesdays to Fridays and from 7am on the weekend.
“We do private parties too, which then go on as long as the client desires,” De Ras said.
Two-and-a-half months ago, he converted his apartment upstairs into a bespoke studio for stills and portraits.
“We klapped the walls down, copied some of the elements from the café, especially the wood designs, to create something that isn’t intimidating.”
De Ras has never put his camera down, except these days he concentrates on corporate work, shooting the cover for Coconut Kelz, Lesego Tlhabi’s forthcoming book, and doing portraits for clients who range from corporate executives to private individuals.
“It’s our unique selling point, you can come and have an event here and pop up stairs to the studio or we can even create studio conditions down here, so you have a chilled time and come away with some great mementoes.”
The studio is also being used as a workshop space for well-known former news photographers like Alet Pretorius and TJ Lemon to host masterclasses.
He believes he got out of the media industry at the right time.
“When I look back, I think of being at the coalface of changing news at a vitally important period in South African history, we weren’t reading about it, we were recording it but eventually, I found my creativity was being stifled, suffocated by the endless cycle of all too similar news events, with lots of service delivery protests and court appearances – depending on the season.
“It was exciting at the time, and something I never saw as my day job. I always aspired to be among the best in the country.”
And now? Now he’s living the dream, literally.