But every morning, as we walked past the shuttered gates on our way to work, we began dreaming about the possibility of a curatorial art cafe that would bring people together – people like us, lovers of coffee and food and art.
Despite our reservations, we started researching what it would take to do this. We consulted with friends who were already in the industry, talked to interior designers, planned menus and worked on a business plan.
After running the projections, we decided to go for it.
Reactions from friends and family varied, to say the least. There were the enthusiastic ones (“That’s so cool! It’s a dream to start a cafe!”), and the cautiously supportive ones (“Sounds exciting but this is a really tough industry”).
And then there were the outright incredulous: “You spent four years getting a communications degree to end up making coffee?”
THE HARD WORK OF LIVING THE DREAM
For most of us, the dream is to have a job that makes us happy to wake up every morning. As the saying goes: “Choose a job you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.”
Even though it didn’t last, I count myself lucky to have spent the past five years doing just that.
For five years, we served all our favourite food and sourced for coffee from small-batch growers in places like Guatemala and Nicaragua. We worked with all kinds of local artists to feature their work on our walls – poetry, photography, tattoo designs, even less conventional things such as taxidermy and keycaps (stylistic covers for keys on computer keyboards).
We turned a blank canvas of a rental unit into something uniquely ours. A space that always smelled of fresh coffee and buttery pastries; a space where someone could sit alone and not feel lonely. A space that felt like a warm hug on a rainy afternoon.
