Comeback Kid - The Return of Grumpy & Runt

Jul 6
4 min read

“I’d never made a doughnut in my life before we started the business,” confesses Johke Steenkamp, founder of Cape Town’s beloved (and famously persistent) vegan deli and doughnut shop Grumpy & Runt. When the ex-private chef struck out to do her own thing with her partner, Carla Gontier, it wasn’t about the product: it was about purpose.

Words: Mia McCarthy

“I was at a point in my life where I really wanted to open something of my own, filled with love and personality”, Johke reflects. By then, she had veered from her design career, gone vegan, and fallen into cooking by dint of necessity — back then, the most exciting vegan dish on any local restaurant menu was a Greek salad with the feta picked out of it.

Bearing this lack of culinary diversity in mind, Johke vowed to bring something sweeter to plant-based diners. “It needed to be sweet treats,” she insists. “I felt like we didn’t have enough. I was also mesmerised by the joy and the sharing that happens with desserts; there’s a sort of fantasy and lightness that is playful, and I really loved that.”

So, they sat down and made a list of all the possible desserts they could explore with the following guiding criteria: it had to be something simple they could produce at scale with a very small team, and it had to behave like a canvas for their creative ideas. Once they had settled on doughnuts, they indulged in two weeks of primary research in New York City — the birthplace of the doughnut.

During their tour, Johke came to appreciate a thriving doughnut culture in the United States and Canada. “People are almost emotional about their doughnuts there,” she says. Sceptics may wish to pause and reflect here on the 2013 invention of the cronut, a croissant-doughnut hybrid developed and trademarked by French pastry chef Dominique Ansel at his

eponymous bakery in SoHo. The cronut drew queues of over 100 hopeful customers within three days of its debut, and was later cited as one of the best inventions of the year by Time magazine.

Capetonians might not have the same fanatical relationship to doughnuts as New Yorkers, but that didn’t stop Grumpy & Runt from becoming a smash hit with the locals. A rotating menu of fantastic flavours drew repeat customers no matter where the shop had reopened its doors, from Dunkley Square to Loop Street. Personally, I was always inclined to try something new: milk tart-filled, dulce de leche, peanut butter and jam. But I could never leave the Grumpy & Runt deli without at least one Homer Simpson doughnut, a classic pink-glazed and sprinkled affair, for my unswervingly habitual fiancée.

For many G&R fans, the doughnut is a (very delicious) loophole through which they can explore plant-based eating without pressure. In a culture of hyper-optimisation, where veganism is sometimes perceived as being synonymous with superior moral and physical health, it’s refreshing to see people enjoy simple and delicious plant-based food.

“Ideally, we’d have more plant-based places that are less weird,” says Johke, by which she means plant-based places that are not also trying to be gluten-free, keto-friendly, and generally appealing to the kind of übermensch who regularly consumes nutrient-dense fluids. “We just want delicious, accessible food and a relaxed, easy menu. In my universe, there would be a lot more of that,” she says.

Fortunately, delicious vegan sandwiches and doughnuts are coming back to the Cape Town culinary scene. After multiple closures, Grumpy & Runt has reopened its doors next to Honest Chocolate on Wale Street. If time is circular and we are meant to come round to the same moments again and again, you could make an argument for the doughnut being the perfect symbol for continuity. It certainly works for Grumpy & Runt, who are no strangers to a grand reopening. Their time away is a sign of the unforgiving market conditions of their industry, but their dogged persistence is a testament to the indomitable spirit of a born Runt.

“The Runt was always part of it for me,” explains Johke when I asked her about the origins of the name. “Little runty animals are really special to me. It’s always the one I adopt, the quirky one with the fighting spirit.” It’s fitting for a business and a founder who has seen so many seasons of evolution and keeps beating the odds to come back in service of a longstanding vision. After a year away from the business, Johke feels as though she’s had a rebirth. Things are different now - Carla, the Grumpy to Johke’s Runt, has stepped away from the business, though not from their shared life - but the reset has also been something of a rediscovery.

“There was something in me that I thought I had lost,” says Johke. “I was burnt out. It was nice to see that I still have resilience and creativity - there is an abundance of it. It doesn’t run out.”