An ugly cafe makes good coffee

The tablecloth was plastic, and so were the chairs. In fact, the chairs are the type of stools you would find at street food stalls - red, blue and generally ugly. The menu board for coffee was sparse.

The cake display was the opposite. Perfectly shaped macarons and artfully composed Mont Blancs were lined next to classic tarts and pots of crème brûlée. And once I picked my cake (Alhambra Torte - 70% chocolate, hazelnut cake soaked with coffee-rum syrup and filled with chocolate ganache), an extensive coffee menu appeared. But again, the look of the menu - home-printed sheets of flimsy paper in an equally shoddy plastic file - didn't seem so promising.

In the end, I spent my afternoon at the siphon-brewed coffee cafe listening to three owners/employees share their views. Here's what I learned:

  1. Give coffee time. Coffee is an agricultural product. We tend to forget this because unlike say wine, coffee is regarded as a grab-and-go beverage. The regret is that certain coffee flavours only open up after the coffee cools.
  2. Give black coffee a chance. We associate black coffee with being bitter and sour, and so we hide those tastes in milk and sugar. But with the right preparation, black coffee can delicious without sugar and milk.
  3. Don't impose your own views. The cafe specialises in siphon-brewed coffee, but willingly serves espressos, lattes and cappuccinos when customers order them. The last thing they want is to forcefully exert their views.
  4. Put yourself in the shoes of the customers. Even within black coffee, they are mindful that everyone comes in with certain preconceptions. Out of the profile of bitterness, sweetness, aroma and sourness, beginners always shun bitter and sour. The cafe staff start by finding a bean which the customer would be comfortable with, then slowly bring them on a journey of discovery.
  5. Defaults are powerful. They understand that default behaviours are powerful. Customers come in used to milky Starbucks. Customers seek out fresh spots, new trends. An unchanging, black coffee cafe like theirs can come across as boring, so they take efforts to explain their philosophy. 
  6. Handmade = unique. How can Paris support so many bakeries and patisseries? Because something handmade is unique. Each bakery and patisserie can find their own niche and supporters. 
  7. Open a cafe to express yourself, not to make money. They realised that many young people take short-cuts like franchising, copying existing concepts or resort to pointless frills (selfie printed on your coffee) to try to make a quick buck. Yet the sustainable way to run a cafe business is to express what makes your special. In that way you cultivate regulars, and regulars are the people who keep your business going after the opening buzz wears off.
  8. Don't worry. In their years of running the cafe, they've been through tough times, but they thought of times of slow business as time when they had time to improve themselves. When 2 of 10 customers criticised their cakes, instead of a knee-jerk reaction to suit their taste (and potentially losing the other 8 customers), they thought long and hard whether they should even change their recipe.
  9. Locals don't appreciate them yet. They say most Penang residents, unlike the more global-minded people from Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, still think of their cafe as an oddball, asking them why they don't bother with their decor.
  10. An ugly cafe makes good coffee. They replied that if the decor is the selling point, they would be distracted into obsessing with the upkeep of their furniture. Instead, they want themselves, and their customers, to always focus on the coffee and the cakes. No sandwiches, no Eggs Benedict.