When opening the door of OR Espresso Bar you are not just walking into a coffee bar, you are entering a coffee world. A world where taste is criteria number one, where cappuccinos are styled to please the eye, where everything and everyone breathes a great respect for this delicious black gold. It might be a challenge to find a free spot but we can guarantee it's absolutely worth it. While Katrien Pauwels runs the coffee bars in Ghent and Brussels, her husband Tom Janssen is in charge of the OR Coffee roastery. Get ready for an intense coffee experience.
THE RABBITS: OR Espresso Bar is much
more than just another coffee bar; it’s a concept.
KATRIEN PAUWELS (OWNER OR COFFEE): True. Our two
coffee bars (one in Ghent and a quite recent one in Brussels) are the most
visible part of it, but we have a shop in Aalst as well and a coffee roastery
in Westrem, which is the very heart of OR. Today we have a training room over
there as well and are allowed to give official barista trainings. Knowing we
were just delivering coffee to restaurants in the past, OR has changed a lot.
And I think that’s our strength: we always try to go further. Roughly speaking
we could say my husband is in charge of the process from choosing the right
beans to the roasting of them; after that I take over.
THE RABBITS: So if we
understand correctly you are very close to the original product.
KATRIEN PAUWELS: In the past
we bought coffee beans via traders and the more traditional circuit but four
years ago we started to go to the country of origin ourselves as much as
possible in order to do business with the coffee farmers directly. I must admit
it takes a lot of time and effort building up these networks and keeping them alive, but it’s very satisfying
and rewarding as well.
THE RABBITS: Does this way
of working imply there’s an ethical aspect involved?
KATRIEN PAUWELS: Yes.
Sometimes we get the question: “Is your coffee fair trade coffee?” In that case
I reply it’s probably more fair than having a fair trade label on it. The
easy way is to buy coffee with a fair trade sticker on it, but it’s an idea we cannot
identify with ourselves. Tom and I started from a passion which we had to transform
into a commercial concept we would be able to live from. The most important thing for us is
the taste of the coffee beans and that is what we constantly keep in mind when picking
the beans. Coffee farmers involved in the “official” fair trade concept get a minimum
price for their beans, but then again, they cannot get more than that either.
We don’t want to work that way. When visiting coffee plants in Honduras for
example, we want to know the quality of their product, the maintenance of the
plants, how they treat their people. We see it with our own eyes. In the case
of Honduras we eventually selected 2 plants of which we really had the feeling
we were on the same level. In June we even invited these farmers over to
Belgium, they stayed at our place and we showed them our Belgian coffee
culture. Because the funny thing is, they are doing business around coffee but
have nothing with consuming it. We grabbed the opportunity to organize a coffee
evening to which our customers were invited and where they could ask their questions
directly to the farmers. And you know what? The same coffee farmers will now
start their own coffee bar in Tegucigalpa for which they ask our advice. This
is a good example of a win-win situation and a very pleasant collaboration.
We currently
have a project in Guatemala and I’m going to Rwanda in March 2013. We try to
add one country per year to our list.
THE RABBITS: Why coffee?
Have you always had some kind of interest in it?
KATRIEN PAUWELS: I didn’t. I drank coffee, but I knew absolutely nothing about it and I never really
thought about the process behind it. It actually was my husband Tom who really
wanted to run his own coffee roastery. His father and grandfather had had one
and I think there was some kind of nostalgia involved. When we were traveling
through Asia for a year, the idea started to move. But it wasn’t that obvious:
no one was waiting for coffee, it wasn’t extraordinary. Therefore we wanted to
bring our coffee in a very different way than people were used to. We first
started the shop in Aalst where we had a small coffee roaster. Little by
little we had to develop our vision. When traveling in those days we noticed that abroad, coffee was served in a very
different way than we did in Belgium. In Ghent you could order a regular coffee
or a cappuccino, which back then was nothing more than a regular coffee with whipped
cream on it, and to go with that you could choose between a waffle or a
pancake. There wasn’t really a quality idea connected to it: people didn’t care about the beans or the value of the product. That’s what opened our eyes. Before
starting our coffee bars we were delivering coffee to regular restaurants but they
didn’t seem to feel the value or quality of it as we did. We realized the
production process didn’t match with the serving process. That’s when we wanted
to serve our coffee in a way we thought it deserved to be served.
THE RABBITS: How important
is this specific location to you?
KATRIEN PAUWELS: Before
stepping into the world of coffee, I used to work for Apple. Ten years ago
there were no Apple stores in Belgium and I was involved in starting them up in
our country. I had to look for locations and appropriate premises, ask for
prices etc. What I learned from that period is that a good location is crucial:
young undertakers often decide to go for a B-location because the difference in
price is considerable, but the profitability simply cannot be compared to the
one of an A-location. When I was looking for a location for the bar I actually
came to sit here a complete day to count the people passing by. There’s an
economic model according to which you can assume that 1% of all passengers will
enter your shop so you simply need a lot of passengers. Since we sell a product
that costs between 2€ and 3€, the bar has to be full every single day.
THE RABBITS: In what
respect does your current location influence your clientele?
KATRIEN PAUWELS: Our clientele
differs according to the day and the time. During the week we have the ones who
want to have a coffee on their way to work in the morning. In the afternoon we
see more students since university is very near. During the weekend we mainly
have the hard working dual-earner couples who want a qualitative weekend and
come here to slow down, have breakfast, read the newspaper, etc.
THE RABBITS: Does that
mean you have less tourists coming in?
KATRIEN PAUWELS: We have few
tourists, and it’s not really the kind of customer we are trying to reach
either. The least pleasant period to
work here is Gentse Feesten, because then we get people in who ask for a Gini
or a Coke (which we don’t even have) and who don’t understand the idea behind
it. Moreover they are not interesting customers from a business point of view: they
never come back and they don’t appreciate our product. I would never consider having
a bar at a touristic location.
THE RABBITS: And if we see
it a bit bigger: why Ghent?
KATRIEN PAUWELS: According to
us three cities were ready for our idea: Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent. We don’t
feel much affinity for Antwerp but I did like Brussels. Nevertheless, since Tom
has his roots in Ghent we decided to start here. And 7 months ago we opened our
second bar in Brussels.
THE RABBITS: Do you have
concrete plans for the future?
KATRIEN PAUWELS: Yes, but not
under own management. There was for example a company that came to us and
wanted to copy-paste the OR concept in other cities. And although we were very
flattered, we refused their offer. It’s impossible to manage fifty coffee bars
maintaining our current quality level. The bars in Ghent and Brussels will
absolutely stay, but we refuse to expand horizontally, having to lower our
standards; I simply would not be able to live with that.
What we do
offer is help and advice to young starters who want to open a coffee bar. We are willing to look into their
business plan and check the feasibility of their ideas. We even want to share
our own financial plan.
THE RABBITS: That’s a
noble thing to do; not many people would do so.
KATRIEN PAUWELS: A lot of
people ask us why we would want to share all our knowledge with people we don’t
even know, but for me that’s a very conservative way of thinking. Of course
there’s a possibility someone will make abuse of it, but that’s a risk we’re willing
to take.
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| Pictures: OR Espresso Bar Facebook Page |
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