From one café to six

The first room was on R. dos Sapateiros, number 111, and it opened in May 2022. Chiado, a street that is busy and slightly hidden at the same time. We had one machine, a small menu and no clear idea whether Lisbon wanted another café. The plan, insofar as there was one, was to make coffee we would want to drink and to be the kind of room people could sit in without being hurried.

Today there are six: Chiado, Alfama, Santos, Blue Street, Sé and Belém. All of them in the middle of the city, all within walking distance of each other if you have the morning free. Around 500 000 people a year come through them, and across the six the average sits at 4,8 on Google over more than 17 800 reviews. Those numbers still read as strange to us, because the work has never felt like scale. It has felt like six rooms, each with its own problems.

What we got wrong

Most of what we learned in the first two years, we learned by being wrong in public. We underestimated how much of a café is logistics: ice, milk, pastry timing, a delivery window on a street with no loading bay. We opened the second site before the first one could run a Saturday without us in it, and we spent months paying for that. We tried a menu that was slightly too long and discovered that a kitchen doing eight things well beats one doing fourteen adequately.

The other lesson was about coffee supply. By our second anniversary in 2024 there were five cafés, a great many cappuccinos and Eggs Benedict behind us, and a roastery project that was only just starting. We had learned that if the coffee is central to what you are, at some point you have to control it. Buying well from someone else got us a long way; it could not give us the ability to change one thing and taste it on our own bars that week.

What stayed the same

• The coffee is the same across all six, roasted weekly at our own roastery to a locked profile, on the same Victoria Arduino machines, dialled in twice a day.
• Nobody is asked to leave. If the room is full we will find you somewhere, and if it is not, the table is yours for as long as you want it.
• Every site has a manager who chooses their own team, and every site is allowed to feel like its street — Alfama is not Belém and should not pretend to be.
• We still write down complaints. A cup that was wrong is more useful information than ten that were fine.

That last point is most of the answer to why the group has never felt like a chain. A chain grows by removing decisions from the people at the counter, because that is what makes a hundred sites possible. We went the other way: we standardised the coffee, the recipes and the training, and left the room itself to the people who work in it. It is slower, it is occasionally inconsistent in small ways, and it is the reason a regular in Santos knows the person making their coffee.

Six cafés in four years is fast by any honest measure, and we have said no to more sites than we have opened. The test is always the same and it is not financial: can we staff it properly, and will it still be somewhere you would choose to sit for an hour. <span class="it">Slow moments in a fast city</span> is not a slogan we can put on a wall and then ignore at the till.

Still the same room on R. dos Sapateiros 111, still open, still the place we take people first.