Ou Meul is a bakery and café on Riviersonderend’s main road, baking bread, pies and pastries on site. The café serves breakfast and lunch — burgers with free-range beef, sandwiches on house bread — and the shop shelves hold local products like honey and preserves alongside the day’s baking.

The bakery began in Riviersonderend and now has fourteen locations across the Western and Eastern Cape, but this is the original. Families stop here for meals — the menu has options for children — and travellers buy pies and bread to take away. The coffee comes from Bootlegger, roasted in Cape Town.

What makes it work is the baking. The kitchen makes everything from scratch, and the breads and pies are the reason most people stop. The shop sells them alongside local jams, cheeses and other small producers’ goods, the way a farm stall would. You can eat at the café tables or take a loaf for the road.