Just Pure Bistro Hermanus South Africa

The Pleasures of Chance

The English took the word ‘café’ from the French and the French took it from the Turks, kahve. Either way , it means coffee and, whichever way you spin it , a decent café speaks for itself. Much depends on how easily its clients, customers and aficionados get to feel happily at home.  And Just Pure Bistro does it for me.

    Terrace Just Pure Bistro   Walker Bay    Hermanus       

A good café bonds with its visitors in an unspoken liaison you feel soon after you sit down. Ernest Hemingway spent much of his writing life in cafés and it made him ask what such homes from home really were for ? He famously summed up the right sort of café as ‘a clean,well- lighted place’, a  welcome refuge in a dark, uncaring world.  He also pointed to the other virtue of a decent café, what it stands against.

Just Pure Bistro is a room with a view and a terrace offering even more of a view. A bistro straddles the indeterminate middle ground between café and brasserie, without bothering about precise definitions. The terrace looks out into Walker Bay. In August and October, hundreds of southern right whales often gather here to mate and calve.  These huge creatures weigh around 80 tonnes and measure up to 20 metres from nose to fluke. 

Where whales gather, they sing to each other. Danish researchers have identified the voice boxes with which these giant submarine baritones (it seems only males sing) produce their songs. Increasingly, these watery operas are drowned out by noisy marine traffic passing overhead. Soon, the songs of whales will be inaudible to the only audience that really counts, other whales. Such is the melancholy reflection of a coffee drinker looking out at the blue immensity of the bay across the road from Just Pure bistro.

Just Pure is firmly French and it may be said to distantly descend from  la Procope in Paris, the mother of all French cafés. Founded in 1686,  in Saint-Germaine-des-Pres, it is still pulling them in today.

 La Procope      Paris      Founded 1686

La Procope has grown rather posh over the centuries and that changes things. When a café counts on prestige it risks becoming a museum,  a mere monument to its past , rather than the warm and well-lighted  place, where a coffee drinker may reflect on how empty the oceans will sound when whales no longer hear themselves sing. 

La Procope was loved over the centuries not for its current, rather over-ripe, decor but for the quality of  its  customers. Some of the brightest minds  of the times, and the most  rebellious , from Voltaire ,Benjamin Franklin , Danton and Chopin to Napoleon, all stopped by la Procope to wet their  whistles. But a good café is not only about big names or bigwigs. What la Procope stood against was boredom, respectability,  snobbery and stupidity . And quite rightly too. This was a café founded by an itinerant lemonade-maker from Sicily, with a sideline flogging Italian ice-cream . Excellent credentials, I’d say.

And I trace a line from La Procope to this café on the bay.   Just Pure has what  it takes to be French - a lightness of spirit. The purity claimed  in its name refers to fresh meals and local produce and has nothing to do with high moral tone. You pay for what is on the menu, but everything else in the room is free. It  offers light and space , a comfortable sofa for the languid and a couple of long, refectory tables seating anything up to ten people. 

I was in for lunch not long ago , seated in solitary splendour at one of the long tables beside the window in which the sea was always building a wall of  blue water. I’d enjoyed pea and ham soup and a glass of local red and was about to leave when a couple sat down at the long table and produced from a bag a bottle of very excellent Eagles Nest Shiraz, 2014 and invited me to join them. I did - and there began a friendship which continues. Not that I sit in cafes expecting company. I go for the pleasure of  being among others,  yet being left alone. But every so often, even the confirmed café-goer has his principles challenged and his habit of solitude happily overturned. 

A good café encourages the mind to wander. And because Just Pure invokes la Procope,  I sometimes recall an  old photograph of  the poet Paul Verlaine in that Parisian water hole. It was taken well over a century ago, but that’s just the other day in the long life of this venerable water hole.  His head on on the banquet , his beret askew, his eyes closed.

Paul Verlaine in Café la Procope      circa 1889

Verlaine was an unhappy man towards the end of his life, hitting the absinthe bottle hard, near destitute, washed up, a bit like a beached whale. Yet I’ll bet no-one passing his table that day, where he leans back happily oblivious, so much as  lifted an eyebrow. He was a familiar in la Procope and, for its regulars, a good café is a comfort zone, not  a confessional.

Christopher Hope