A couple of months ago one of our customers came to me with a worried look and asked “Do you know who is taking the shop next door?”
“We are.” I replied
“Oh that’s a relief”, he said. “When I saw the wood battening going on the front I thought someone was ripping you off”.
We’ve had our eye on 14 Charlotte Place, the shop beside Lantana, since the beginning as it was also for lease when we were looking for a site. At the time it seemed a bit ambitious to take on two sites so we moved into 13 Charlotte Place and watched next door with interest as others went in….
and out again.
When we heard it was back on the market late last year it seemed fated that we should take it as Lantana had become slightly chaotic at busy times with staff, eat in and takeaway customers bumping into each other as they tried to navigate a small narrow cafe. Here was an opportunity to create two separate spaces for eat in and takeaway customers and let everyone breathe more easily.
Taking our cue from the Naval and Military Club (known as The In and Out Club) which had lettering on the gate posts of its old home on Piccadilly to guide London cabbies in and out of the club driveway,
we’ve sign posted Lantana to guide customers in and out of the two parts of the cafe.
The entry for customers who want to dine in (or outside)
The entry for customers taking out their coffee, cakes, salads, tarts, sandwiches
And for those who can't decide whether they're an innie or an outtie, there's even a spot where you can stop and have a think about it.
Thanks to Etienne (Lantana customer) and Suzi (Lantana waitress) for many of the photos (the good ones) on this blog post.
Before I opened Lantana I spent many months researching coffee suppliers; meeting with different roasters, sampling their various single origin coffees and blends, and testing how they tasted in different types of drinks. The challenge was to find a coffee that tasted as good as an espresso as it did in a milky drink like a latte so that I could satisfy as many customers as possible. The challenge, with that much caffeine coursing through my blood stream, was to stop my brain exploding and stay focused enough to make rational decisions.
I went on field trips to warehouses and cafes across London and met the entire spectrum of coffee suppliers from artisan micro roasters to large scale distributors.But the company I found myself benchmarking all others against was the one I eventually chose as our supplier - Monmouth.
It wasn’t just the taste of the coffee that I loved, it was the whole ethos of the company and particularly, the company’s founder, Anita le Roy, that impressed me. Anita is one of the pioneers of the UK coffee industry who started roasting coffee in the basement of a small shop in Covent Garden in the seventies. She had a vision to provide ethically produced high quality coffee to the UK market and the stamina and determination to keep doing it for 30 years. After all this time she is still very hands on in the day to day running of the business and as committed as ever to the principles on which Monmouth was founded. She seems to have achieved the impossible by successfully growing and building a company while keeping it ‘small’.
Time will tell whether I have her stamina but I know I share her determination to continually improve the coffee we offer our customers. So after 18 months of using Monmouth’s Espresso blend, I wanted to see if we couldn’t tweak it slightly to create the perfect Lantana Espresso blend; one that tastes sweet and smooth when drunk as an espresso but with enough richness and body to retain a strong character when its made into a milk based coffee.
Under the guidance of Monmouth's coffee buyer, AJ Kinnell, we experimented with ratios of various single origin coffees and came up with a few different blends to compete in the Lantana Cup of Excellence*. As I couldn’t get the CoE's official international jurors (of which Anita is one) to judge the results, I called on Lantana's esteemed and opinionated baristas to form the judging panel.
Sean, Colleen and Brooke sample the blends
After much deliberation, the recipe for our Lantana Espresso blend (and label colour) was chosen; a blend of Ethiopian Cabey Yirgacheffe, Guatemalan Finca La Perla and Brazilian Fazenda Rainha.
We’ve been using our bespoke blend for about a month in the café and the feedback we’re getting from espresso and latte drinkers alike is positive so hopefully we’re on the path to creating the Lantana Cup of Excellence.
*Cup of Excellence are national competitions to find single-estate coffees that can be set aside from the commodity coffee market, where prices have been dropping due to over-production in some regions. The competition is run every year in nine coffee-producing countries from Colombia to El Salvador and Rwanda, and the winning coffee is chosen by a select group of national and international cuppers. The Cup of Excellence beans are considered the peak of coffee production and are sold to the highest bidder during an internet auction.
Given the right conditions, it spreads quickly. Lantana is a lalopathic, releasing chemicals into the surrounding soil to prevent seed germination, notably of the native flora, so that it eventually takes over native bushland.
Like its floral namesake, an Australian weed of national significance, Lantana Café is showing signs of an invasive spread in Charlotte Place, London.
There is little that can amuse me at 6.45am on these cold dark wintry mornings as I crawl from my warm bed, wrap myself in multiple layers of clothing, grit my teeth and pedal furiously along the icy roads to get to work and back indoors as quickly as possible. 25 minutes later with numb fingers, my nose and eyes streaming, I lock my bike to the rail in Goodge Place and peak out from a gap in my woollies to check the window of one of the buildings on the laneway.
Every few weeks the office of Freestate changes the photographic collage displayed in their front window. There has been a gold plated Bob the Builder
swimmers on diving blocks
flags with dates showing when Father's Day is celebrated around the world
and countless others that I have only recorded in my mind’s eye.
In those early hours of the morning when the streets are gloomy and deserted, the window welcomes me like an amuse bouche*. It is a bite sized visual titillation that teases my brain and often puts a smile on my face before I cross the road and step inside the café.
Imagine my surprise the other morning when I glanced up to see a larger than life Lantana latte in the Freestate window to amuse my eyes.
That did make me smile.
*amuse bouche def: \a-'myuz bush\ [Fr. amuse the mouth] 1: a small bite before the meal begins . 2: greeting of the Chef de cuisine.
My father had an expression for when mum was pulling her hair out, fed up with the drudge of raising four young children or when one of us was struggling with exams or a broken heart. He'd say “You’re not Robinson Crusoe”. It became one of those well worn expressions that I didn’t really give much thought to at the time but had a vague sense that Dad was trying to be comforting, telling us that we weren’t the only person experiencing whatever difficulties we were going through. We weren’t castaways like Robinson Crusoe, alone on an island.
Dad's words popped into my head again as I read Emily Kerrigan’s article in this month’s Olive Magazine about six people (including me) who have changed careers and started up food related businesses. Before the interview, we were all asked to think of five things that we wished someone had told us before we started our businesses- what we’d learned, mistakes we’d made along the way. I was the last person Emily interviewed and as we spoke she commented on the fact that there were many similarities in what we had each told her: be patient and remain positive through the times when business is slow; be prepared to be flexible and adapt if things don’t work; trust your instincts and keep faith in what you are doing; and learn from the mistakes you make.
Last night as I read through the stories in the article I felt incredibly comforted that, even though I didn't know it at the time, I had not been alone. While I was getting Lantana started, there were many others experiencing the same doubts, frustrations, long hours, and highs and lows that I was.
So I’m adding one more piece of advice to anyone who is starting up their own business: Don't feel that you are going through this alone. You're not Robinson Crusoe.
Food bloggers are usually elusive creatures. They come into the café, sit quietly, intently observe their surroundings, take photos of everything that is put in front of them, then retreat to their computers where they blog about their experience, letting their opinions be known to the entire world under some clever nom de plume (like say, Scrambling Eggs). The first I learn of their visit is when I stumble across their blog (if googling “Lantana cafe review” constitutes stumbling) by which time they are long gone and I unsuccessfully try to put a face to the blogger based on what they have written. You can guarantee if you forget someone’s side of bacon, or sit them on a wobbly chair, they will be a god damn food blogger.
Herein lies the frustration for restaurateurs. Unlike many well established restaurant reviewers like Fay Maschler, Giles Coren, AA Gill and Jay Rayner, who can be spotted immediately thanks to the photographs published beside their reviews, food bloggers are able to preserve their anonymity with the best disguises in the world. They look like IT programmers, graphic designers, students and accountants because often this is what they are from 9 to 5.By night and on the weekend they are bloggers, finding a creative outlet through the keyboard and connecting with other people who share their passion for food.
While food bloggers may not have the culinary expertise or writing skills of professional food critics, their ability to dine anonymously and receive non-sycophantic treatment gives their experience as an average diner an authenticity that well known restaurant reviewers have lost. Ruth Reichel, when she was the restaurant reviewer for the New York Times, famously wrote 2 reviews of a well known French Restaurant in New York. One was how she was treated when they did recognise her and the other when they didn’t because she was in disguise. The difference was enormous and demonstrated that restaurant reviewers’ experience of a restaurant is not necessarily authentic or useful to the average punter who is not going to receive special treatment.
So I was quite surprised the other day when one food blogger, known only to me as Catty, asked to do a video interview with me for her blog.
What? In the open? Face to face? At last, I got to meet one of these bloggers who will never be able to dine anonymously at Lantana again.
Funnily enough, since Catty posted this video on her blog I can now spot food bloggers more easily because they’re the ones ordering and photographing baked eggs.
This is a story about a little girl, in stature rather than age, who traveled all the way to London from Melbourne Australia to open a café.
Task: convince the Brits that there are better ways to start the day than with their most significant export, "the Full English";
Experience in running a cafe: none;
Optimism: high.
I’ve decided to keep a blog so that I can either press print and sell millions of copies of my amazing success story, or give those who are secretly thinking she'll never pull it off, an opportunity to see why.
