The Best Bakeries in Pretoria, South Africa

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Here are a few good addresses for cakes, cookies and pastries.

Pretoria’s Hazelwood neighbourhood, southeast of the city centre, is a popular new dining hub with a variety of restaurants to choose from. Spout Coffee, a chic bakery/coffee shop built with recycled storage containers, is in the middle of it all. Spout is just as pleasing to the eye as it is to the taste buds; the café’s co-owner Veronica Exter doubles as a food stylist, and it shows. Beautiful baked goods – cakes, tarts, muffins, cookies, all prepared on-site – are artfully displayed everywhere you look. Spout serves great coffee, as its name implies, and a full menu of sandwiches and light meals at pleasant wooden tables under a tall tree.

Die Brotstube, which means “the Bread Room” in German, is (you gue

ssed it) a German bakery near Silverton in eastern Pretoria. Owned and operated by Germans, Die Brotstube sells authentic German breads and baked goods like laugenbrezn (German pretzels), bauernbrot (farmer’s bread), and apfel mit decke (apple pastry). While not a full-service restaurant, Die Brotstube serves coffee to accompany its baked goods.

Grounded at Echo, a coffee shop in Pretoria North’s “Antique Route 6” district, serves a delicious variety of baked goods. The pleasant café has excellent service and also includes a co-working space. Pastries and desserts, including croissants, muffins, quiches and an assortment of cakes and tarts, are buy-one-get-one-free after 3pm each day.

De Zucker Bäcker means “the Sugar Baker” in German, and the name is apt for this bakery. While De Zucker Bäcker no longer has German owners (Shani Parker, one of the current owners, is a South African who spent many years living in Israel), there is no shortage of sweet things here. The bakery specialises in German Bee Sting cake, or Bienenstich – made with brioche dough, pastry cream, almonds and honey – as well as other cakes and breads of all sorts. De Zucker Bäcker’s most decadent dessert is the cake milkshake, which blends an entire (very large) slice of cake with ice cream into a milkshake.

The Bread Gypsy is a small, artisan bread-maker using only stone-ground flour mixed with water, wild yeast and salt to make its dough, which is baked in a wood-fired oven. The Bread Gypsy’s varieties include ciabattas, baguettes, seed loaves, rye and sourdough breads. The bakery itself is on a farm in Kameeldrift, far north of the city, but the Bread Gypsy sells its bread at the Lucky Bread Company in Pretoria’s Brooklyn Mall and at the Boeremark and Hazelwood Food Markets on Saturdays.

Belem Bakery is right in downtown Pretoria, on a busy street across from a large taxi rank which hundreds – if not thousands – of commuters pass through every day. Founded more than 30 years ago as a Portuguese bakery, Belem is more of an everyman’s bakery today. The relatively small shop – packed full of customers during weekday lunchtimes — belies the massive commercial bakery behind it, where staff work all night baking bread, cakes, pies and scones for sale the following day. Although most of Belem’s baked goods are conventionally South African, you can still find traditional Portuguese custard tarts, or pasteis de nata, for sale here.