C is for Coffee / Barista

Barista logo

The red is vibrant and fresh, the palm tree reminds us of better places, the name can only give you images of perfectly served coffee. Coffee bar Barista not only has a great logo, it has two great locations (Zuid and Zuivelbrug) and − what did you expect? − great coffee. Even soy milk for the lactose intolerant! Here's a coffee stop tip for the rainy winter days.

 

ROSIE & THE RABBITS: You started Barista Zuid in 2007. Was this a dream?

SABINE VAN DORPE (Owner Barista): No, everything started more or less by coincidence. We were looking for a new tenant for this building. Back then it already was a nice building on the outside, but inside it was full of false walls and false ceilings. So we specifically wanted a tenant who would have an eye for the esthetical aspect. But a lot of the candidates were interim agencies, which we wanted to avoid, so we decided to "clean up" things ourselves.

In the end we thought this location and building were very appropriate for a coffee bar, especially with the large windows. Nevertheless we didn’t know anything about coffee as a product and had to learn about it. We tried ten coffee brands in order to find the perfect fit for our concept and eventually we chose Viva Sara. I wanted to work with high quality products instead of serving Coke light and Martino sandwiches. This means we had to be very persistent in the beginning and from a commercial point of view that wasn't always easy.

ROSIE & THE RABBITS: Why this location?

SABINE VAN DORPE: The Zuid area could really use a boost. It looked quite different at that time: there were mostly interim agencies and there was only one luxury boutique. We wanted to offer a healthy pause, for example to people working here, so from the beginning we had the plan to combine a coffee bar with a bio-bakery, without emphasizing the biological aspect too much. 

ROSIE & THE RABBITS: Were you missing this kind of coffee bar in Ghent when you started in 2007?

SABINE VAN DORPE: Absolutely. Not that I'm such a coffee drinker but these are the kind of bars I enter when travelling abroad. We didn't have these in Ghent at all; we had Mokabon and that was more or less it. We really wanted a coffee bar for young and old, for both enjoying coffee inside and take away. Nothing like Starbucks however; it had to be high quality coffee for a wide range of people.

ROSIE & THE RABBITS: Have you become a difficult customer yourself when it comes to coffee drinking since having your own coffee bar? 

SABINE VAN DORPE: Yes, if the coffee is not what I expect it to be, I simply don’t drink it. In general I only order coffee if I’m confident it will be served like I want it to. Moreover I’m allergic to cow milk, that’s also the reason why we have soy milk on the menu. Anyhow, I think customers have become more demanding in general; nowadays they all have high standards.

ROSIE & THE RABBITS: There’s another Barista coffee bar at Zuivelbrug. Do you have a different clientele or approach there?

SABINE VAN DORPE: First of all, we opened it two years after the bar at Zuid. We also wanted a more spacious location. The clientele is a bit different since at Zuivelbrug we have a lot more tourists. Here at Zuid we mostly have people who work or live here.  

ROSIE & THE RABBITS: Recently you bought a boat as well. Plans for the future?

SABINE VAN DORPE: It happened again by coincidence. My husband loves boats very much and made an offer on the internet. And in the end it was ours! So then we started thinking: what do we do with it? It’s an antique boat which in the Netherlands is already use from time to time to sail on the inland waterways.

So the current concept is that people can rent the boat, get a brunch basket and can come to Barista Zuivelbrug for a coffee when they get back. We also want to show our city from the water, in a quiet way, without having a guide yelling into a microphone. And we also sail beyond the tourist attractions.

ROSIE & THE RABBITS: While a lot of other coffee bars in Ghent serve cakes from Les Tartes de Françoise, we only see homemade cakes at Barista. How important is this to you?

SABINE VAN DORPE: It started as a hobby. I have loved this for as far as I can remember so it’s not a task either. Moreover there wasn’t any supplier for biological pastries and we wanted authentic, simple cakes. It started small, but at Barista Zuivelbrug we now have someone baking cakes on a fulltime basis. 

ROSIE & THE RABBITS: Another thing that immediately got our attention is your very original logo. Where did the idea of having a palm tree come from?

SABINE VAN DORPE: Well, for every aspect of our business we wanted to work with qualitative partners. We already knew graphics Jan and Randoald and knew their style. When we asked them to work out a proposal, they made two drafts for us. We were very happy with these from the beginning. The link isn't obvious; instead of a coffee cup or bean, we have this palm tree since coffee grows in tropical countries. I think the logo is simple and recognizable. For our name we have been looking a very long time; we always thought "barista" was too obvious but at a certain moment we realized how clean and straightforward it was and often that's the best solution.

ROSIE & THE RABBITS: We see this very large photograph of Erwin Olaf on the wall. Do you change the items on the wall from time to time?

SABINE VAN DORPE: My husband and I like art very much. We were thinking about the concept for the bar and saw this photograph at an exposition in Turin. We kept thinking about it and eventually we bought it. It has just been hung back on the wall since it had lost its colour due to the sun shining in, so we had it restored. 

The toilet doors in the bar for example have been decorated by a young artist who lived above the bar. And in the other bar at Zuivelbrug we have a very large work of art consisting of a lot of small drawings. It didn’t fit our house anymore  but for the bar it’s perfect.


www.mybarista.be 

www.facebook.com/pages/BARISTA-coffeecake 

Erwin Olaf, The Kitchen

C is for Coffee / OR Espresso Bar

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.

www.orcoffee.be

www.facebook.com/pages/OR-Espresso-Bar

Pictures: OR Espresso Bar Facebook Page