Milestones

Yesterday Lantana turned 6 months old.

In our opening week, someone who had run a couple of restaurants told me that the next 6 months would be the weirdest time of my life.

Although I don’t have first hand knowledge of having a baby, I sense that starting a new business is a bit like being a first time mother. All the books you read and the advice you receive can’t prepare you for the actual experience of the birth and the first few months of their life; the emotional highs and lows, the physical exhaustion, the heightened sensitivity to any criticism or suggestion that you are doing things wrong or are a bad mother, the reluctance to leave your baby in anyone else’s care and the remnants of food and milk that you constantly find on your clothes.

Looking at Lantana on Saturday morning, I felt incredibly pleased and relieved that we have reached a milestone and survived the first six months.


The cafe is a living, breathing reality which no longer has the fragility and vulnerability of a new born, and I have much more confidence in what I am doing.

Now I need to find that man again to ask him, what happens after 6 months?

According to this parenting guide, "separation and stranger anxiety may begin". Begin?

Loyalty has its rewards

For six months I have resisted doing a ‘loyalty card’ because it felt too gimmicky. My argument has been that people will keep returning to Lantana if we do what we do well. I am loyal to cafes that I like and won’t keep going to a place that serves crap coffee just because they stamp a little card and promise to give me some of their crap coffee for free on my tenth visit.

But I realise that loyalty cards are also a way to say thankyou to the customers who walk past all the other places serving takeaway coffee and return to Lantana because they like what we do.

So here it is, the Lantana stamp book: a collectors item.

Every time you buy a hot drink to takeaway, you can collect a stamp. The more stamps you collect, the better the reward.

Collect 8 stamps for a takeaway coffee


Collect 12 stamps for a glass of prosecco

Collect 16 stamps for an eat-in breakfast of your choice.

Corn fritters with crispy bacon, slow roast tomatoes, rocket and aioli

Our first loyalty card recipient is already halfway to a free coffee- doing the office coffee run also has its rewards.

Familiarity breeds contentment

In my previous workplace I sat in an open plan office with the same people day in and day out for many years. We could spend hours deconstructing a film we had seen or discussing the significance of being a middle child as opposed to a youngest or eldest child (policy advisors like to practise their analytical thinking). I came to know those people almost better than I knew my siblings. Now, I see loads of different faces every day and the conversations we have are fleeting and rarely more meaningful than ‘do you take sugar’ or ‘would you like a bag for that’? I share my workspace with customers who don’t have names or personalities to me.

Over the weeks and months I’ve started to see the same faces returning again and again. I now remember what they have each day – middle aged American man has poached eggs on toast and a single espresso, the Australian girl with the quirky brooches has a small decaf flat white to takeaway, the English man with the leather jacket has porridge and a long black and the tall woman with the fur coat and straight fringe has a large skinny latte.

Most of the time that’s all I learn about them, but sometimes we start to engage and I discover that the large flat white is called Tom and is expecting his first baby and the double chocolate brownie is Ann who has a just been made redundant. The customer becomes a name with a personality.

One of my favourite regulars is a Spanish man with a large collection of scarves who has a latte with two sugars and a small orange juice.


Over the course of his daily visits the ‘latte and orange juice’ has become Alberto, co-founder of Webjam, digital artist, musician, surfer and admirer of brutalist architecture.

Alberto with his business partner, and another Lantana regular, Marcus

Alberto told me he was first drawn to Lantana because he heard we were using Monmouth coffee which he used to drink all the time when he lived near the Monmouth coffee store at Borough Market. He says that once he finds somewhere he likes he goes there again and again because it makes the city feel smaller; ‘to feel the warmth of people who recognise you, know your name and know what coffee you drink’.

Touche. It’s the small gestures of friendliness and familiarity from regulars (like Alberto letting me know that my blog had been named by Timeout as one of London's best food blogs) that make me feel that I also have a personality and am not just a nameless face behind a counter serving coffee. Maybe this is important to me because I’m a youngest child…

Coffee out

After spending Mondays to Saturdays serving people in the café, on Sundays I get immense pleasure from sitting in someone else’s café, reading the paper and drinking coffee. It really doesn’t take much to make me happy.

Unfortunately, it also doesn’t take much to send me into a blind rage. Bad coffee will do it.

I have discovered through bitter, and watery, experience that there can be no accidental good coffee finds in London. You need to know where you are going as the odds of walking into a random café and finding decent coffee are about 16 (listed below) in 1000.

The other weekend I was heading to the Tate Britain in Pimlico and wanted to stop somewhere en-cycle for my Sunday ritual. I sat at the computer googling ‘good coffee’ and the names of the areas I would pass through but after about half an hour decided to chance the coffee at the Tate Britain rather than waste the entire morning at home.

The café at the top of the Tate Modern actually does decent coffee – in a pretty amazing setting.
At the Tate Britain on the other side of the Thames, the café and the espresso bar are in the bowels of the building with no views to distract you. Straight away I knew my coffee was going to be a huge disappointment as I saw the disinterested, grumpy man behind the coffee machine ignoring the most basic coffee making rules - not wiping the basket clean of the old grinds, not tamping properly, not flushing between shots, scalding the milk…

My anger (why hadn’t someone taught this guy how to make coffee) and frustration (I was now dying for a coffee with no alternatives nearby) grew as I waited in the queue, desperately wanting to give him some tips before he made my coffee but knowing that I couldn’t as it would make me the most annoying person on the planet.


So instead I stood there quietly and seethed on the inside, hoping that by some miracle he would fluke a good coffee. Unfortunately this book could be judged by the cover: frothy over heated milk covering watery coffee. The final insult is that they charge £2.5 for the disappointment.


What I need, what London needs, is a map of all the places where you can get good coffee – something along the lines of Breakfastout, a website which lists only the best places for breakfast/brunch in Melbourne and Sydney.

I have developed a mental map of where to go for coffee but London is a big city and this list leaves a lot of soil unchartered, for instance, the Pimlico area.

My coffee out list so far:

Barbican: Dose Espresso
Bloomsbury: Bea’s of Bloomsbury, London Review of Books
Borough Market: Monmouth
Broadway Market: Climpson and Sons
Covent Garden: Monmouth
Fitzrovia: LANTANA
Marylebone: The Providores
Nottinghill: Coffee Plant, The Electric (both are a bit hit and miss these days)
Soho: flat white, Milkbar, Fernandez and Wells
Spitalfields: Taylor St Baristas, Nude Espresso, Market Coffee House

Does anyone know of other places doing good coffee in London?

Thanks Charmaine for letting me know that such a list already exists. Nice work.

You’re terrible Muriel

But you mural, you’re lovely.

When a friend suggested that his sister draw a mural for one of the walls of the café I tried to look interested and force a smile as I imagined scenes of rain forests, leaping dolphins, palm trees and sunsets.


Then I saw some of his sister's beautiful and stylish illustrations and realised that her mural would have little in common with Muriel Hesslop from Porpoise spit.

Kat Macleod is the talented Melbourne artist who created the whimsical scene on the back wall of the cafe. It makes me feel happy every time I look at it as I'm transported into the serene, lush landscape that Kat has created. The first time I saw it I could almost hear the sound of crickets and feel the Australian humidity.

My favourite seat in the café is the corner nook where I can sit by myself under the skylight, unnoticed amongst the foliage.

It seems strange that someone I have never met and who has never even been to Lantana is such an integral part of the café. Hopefully one day Kat and I will have a face to face conversation over breakfast at Lantana, but until then we’ll have to settle for a cyber conversation over the keyboard.

Have you always wanted to be an illustrator?

Kat: I have loved drawing for as long as I can remember, and probably wanted to be an illustrator as soon as I knew what one was. I always wanted to be a graphic designer too, which is cool because now I do both! I co-run a graphic design company called Ortolan with my two business partners Chloe Quigley and Simone Elder. And we are very proud to have designed the identity and graphics for Lantana. It was a very fun job, and so nice to work on both the graphic design components and the illustration.

Which artists do you most admire?

Kat: I have so many favourites. My top three are Julie Verhoeven, Rene Gruau and Aubrey Beardsley. I love them because they are masters at drawing the human form, and have their own beautiful and inimitable styles.

What was your inspiration for the Lantana mural?

Kat: We loved when you told us that your cafe was going to be called Lantana, named after the striking, noxious weed which is a pest in the Australian countryside. I wanted to illustrate the beautiful invasive plant growing wild like they do in Aussie back-yards, giving a sense of taking over the cafe, but in a beautiful way. We thought the super-scale would work really well, and I included lots of details so that when you walk downstairs you discover a wonderful detailed weedy-world full of gigantic birds, beetles crawling among the foliage. My favourite part is the giant magpie peeking out the stairs.


Was it an enjoyable project to work on?

Kat: Yes! I had so much fun researching all kinds of Australian flora and fauna, and I loved working in the all-black palette. I used fineliners, ink, gouache and black watercolour to create the piece. The original drawing is very big, it’s made of two large poster-sheets, it took over two desks in the studio. It had to be scanned on a flat bed scanner in many seperate parts, and pieced together at full resolution in Photoshop. The final product on the wall instore is about ten times the size of the original.

The mural gets pieced together in London

What is your favourite cafe?

Kat: We are spoiled for choice in Melbourne. There are so many interesting, eclectic cafes with great food and friendly staff, especially on the North-side of the river which is where we live. I have so many favourite places, but the best would have to be The Breakfast Club in Northcote. All their dishes are named after characters and actors from the movie. The food is amazing. Some other favourite local places include Julio’s in North Fitzroy, A Minor Place in Brunswick, and Mixed Business in Clifton Hill. They all make amazing food and excellent coffee, and are very interesting places with lots of personality.

What is your favourite breakfast?

Kat: On the weekend I love any kind of interesting vegetarian breakfast concoction, and a soy latte. During the week I am boring and just get a take away soy latte on the run from Tre Bicchieri in Carlton. They make great breakfasts too but there’s no time to stop and eat because I am usually running late for work.


Some of the other customers at Tre Bicchierri who are clearly not rushing to get to work.

More on Kat Macleod...

The face of adversity

Monday the 2nd of February 2009 will be remembered by me as the day that 'adverse weather conditions' became the latest weasle words to be accepted into the vernacular as have ‘the war on terror’, ‘credit crunch’, and ‘the journey’ that every X-Factor contestant blubs about.

6.30am Monday morning Lisa, Lantana’s head chef, rang me tell me that she didn’t think it would be worth opening as no one could get to work. I opened the curtains and was amazed by the whiteness and the silence. Snow everywhere and not a car or bus on the road.


I thought I should still go into Lantana for a couple of hours to catchup on some paperwork so I went on to the Transport for London website to see what public transport was running. I smiled when I read that no buses were running and many tube lines were suspended due to “adverse weather conditions”. I love obtuse government speak. But as I proceeded on my journey to the café (a physical one, not a metaphorical one), I discovered that this expression had gained widespread adoption as the new word for snow. Shops displayed signs saying they were shut “due to adverse weather conditions”, every five minutes an announcement was made in tube stations about delays caused by “the adverse weather conditions” and the next day the newspapers told of school closures, losses to small businesses and numbers of people unable to get to work due to the “adverse weather conditions”.

I didn’t get to do any paperwork or play in the snow because I ended up making coffee for a steady stream of regulars who came into Lantana throughout the day. So for me, the best part about the adverse weather conditions is that it gave everyone an opportunity to talk and read about something other than the ‘global financial crisis’.

To the victor go the spoils...

of toasted banana bread with date and pecan butter.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Jenny won Lantana’s mintie competition.

The entries
The judging
The longest mintie wrapper in London

The other entrants may take some consolation in knowing that this is not the first time that Jenny has taken first prize in a mintie wrapper tearing competition. At primary school Jenny won a packet of musk sticks for creating the longest unbroken mintie wrapper chain. She claims that her breakfast of choice at Lantana was a much better first prize. Note, champions eat bananas, not pancakes or fried eggs and bacon.