Lunch at the Edge of the Timber Yard
A Guide for the DIY-Weary, the Mildly Existential, and Anyone Who Deserves a Proper Meal
Just like Douglas Adams, I love a deadline. I love the whooshing sound it makes as it flies past. This blog should have been written a week ago. Possibly two. I have no satisfactory explanation for this, and Adams would have understood completely.
The problem was I didn’t know how to write about Noag’s without it sounding like a sales pitch dressed up as a story. “Amazing steaks! Great timber discounts! Come visit us!”, you’ve read that blog. Everyone has written that blog. It is the literary equivalent of cheap, damp charcoal.
So, I decided on a history lesson instead. Or at least, history as I remember it, which, given the pace at which things happen at Noag’s, is probably close enough.
In the Beginning, There Was Timber
In 2014, we knew timber and hardware. We knew building material and paint. We knew exactly how many H4 CCA poles fit on a delivery truck and precisely how long brickforce takes to rust if you store it wrong. What we did not know was cakes and burgers.
René said it will be fun. Jaco said no — which, to his credit, is a perfectly reasonable response to the suggestion of opening a restaurant inside a timber yard. Peet said let’s build it, which is also his response to most things, and why we have a lot of impressive structures on this property. Tannie Alet and Oom Stan joined us, and in doing so probably saved us from a galaxy of mistakes that we will never fully know about, which is the best kind of saving.
And now, a few years and a great many plates of pap later, Andreas has built our little Milliways into something that people drive past the hardware specifically to reach. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite something.
The Three Phases of Civilisation (According to Adams, and also us)
According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the history of every major Galactic Civilisation passes through three distinct phases: Survival, Inquiry, and Sophistication — better known as the How, Why, and Where phases. Specifically: “How can we eat?”, “Why do we eat?”, and “Where shall we have lunch?”.
For years, hardware and timber yards have been firmly stuck in the Survival phase — obsessed with the How of fixing a collapsed deck or a leaky pipe, with absolutely no interest in the Where of feeding the person fixing it. You brought your own lunch, or you went without, or you ate something sad and triangular from a garage forecourt three kilometres away.
We decided, in 2015, that it was time to provide a sophisticated answer to the Where. That decision has fed a lot of people. We remain pleased with it.
Six Impossible Things Before Lunch
The famous tagline for Milliways – the Restaurant at the End of the Universe – suggests that if you’ve done six impossible things this morning, you should round it off with a visit. In our corner of the galaxy, we understand that “impossible things” usually look something like this:
Leaky plumbing that defies the known laws of physics and two YouTube tutorials.
A collapsed deck that has quietly surrendered to the void, taking your Saturday plans with it.
A DIY disaster of sufficient scale that you begin to suspect your whole weekend was some kind of dream.
Realising, at 5pm on a Friday, that there is no meat for the braai. This is a crisis. Treat it as one.
Running out of cement exactly when the concrete has decided to set, which it will, and at speed.
Discovering the paint colour on your wall is “Loathsome Lilac” and matches absolutely nothing in your home, your life, or the known universe.
If you find yourself staring at a mismatched paint sample with the quiet despair of someone who has made a series of increasingly poor decisions since 8am: Don’t Panic.
We’ve got a table.
The Middle of Everywhere
Most places of significance are located, as Adams noted, in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm. We, by contrast, are on Pomona Road, Kempton park.
With OR Tambo International Airport up the road, Pretoria down the road, and Johannesburg across the highway, Noag’s Market sits at one of those rare gravitational points where everything passes eventually. We have been here since 1992. We have watched the East Rand change around us, and we have remained reliably, stubbornly, usefully here.
coffee@NOAG’s opened in 2015 because we noticed something: people drove past us, or stopped for poles, or came in for paint, and then left again with no reason to stay. We wanted to give them a reason to stay. A flat white. A slice of something good. A chair next to a fireplace in winter, with the windmill inviting you in.
Turns out people like having a reason to stay. Who knew. (René knew.)
The Only Stone Our Restaurant is Built Upon
Just as Milliways was built on the fragmented remains of a ruined planet to provide a front-row seat to the end of time, we built a kitchen and a dining room in the middle of a working timber yard to provide something slightly more immediately useful: a proper meal and someone who is genuinely happy to see you.
We talk a lot in business about service being the cornerstone. At coffee@NOAG’s, service isn’t the cornerstone, it’s the only stone. The building could theoretically be anywhere in the galaxy. The warmth of the people inside it is what makes it worth finding.
Tannie Alet and Oom Stan understood this before anyone put it into a brand document. Some people just know how to make a stranger feel like a regular on their first visit. That’s not a skill you can train into someone in a week. You either have it or you don’t. We have been very fortunate in the people who have chosen to work here, and we do not take that lightly.
The Dish of the Day
Our Dish of the Day won’t introduce itself and politely offer to be eaten. It won’t walk up to your table and explain which parts of itself are particularly tender. It is, in this respect, considerably less interactive than the Dish of the Day at Milliways, but the flavour, we are told, more than compensates.
We serve the Ultimate Answer to hunger: traditional South African food that makes you feel, for the duration of the meal at least, that the universe is fundamentally ordered and benevolent. Pap, skilpadjies, boerewors, slow-cooked potjies that have been thinking about themselves since early morning. Plates designed not to impress you with their architecture, but to make you sit back afterwards and feel that things are, broadly speaking, going to be alright.
The steaks are also very good. We mention this not as a sales pitch, but as a fact, and we feel you deserve to have it.
The Ultimate Question
noags.co.za | 011 396 2300