One of the most important and basic elements of our coffee shops is that the coffee is the focal point. We don’t serve avocado sandwiches, hot chilli for cold winter days or even little squares of chocolate on the saucer only croissants in the morning and small, delicate pastries like a granola bar – nothing that has enough potency to take the focus away from the the cup. We want to share unique coffee experiences without too many distractions.

A lot of good restaurants have begun to work on their coffee profile to make it as much a part of the experience as the food and wine. This is a great development that gives us, as a specialty coffee community, a much broader audience to share great coffee experiences with. It also brings coffee into the light, makes it more than just that black stuff we drink when cake is on the table, which gave rise to the idea we are now testing at our coffee shop on Godthåbsvej. We wanted to look into serving more food with the coffees without turning into a cafe.     

The idea was to keep it as simple as possible. Three small dishes, each paired with a specific coffee as a combined experience. The dishes change along with our coffee menu, so new flavour combinations can be tested.

Every dish consists of a couple of slices of sour doe bread and some butter served with different jams and purées consisting of a single ingredient pressure cooked with just a little bit of sugar, to preserve it, and maybe a small squeeze of lemon. This is topped with some kind of ingredient, could be a type of nut, to give it some texture and flavour balance. Other sides could be different cured meats or cheese all depending on which coffee we want pair it with.

This is the menu as it looks at the moment:

Very simple and small. It’s not a full meal, more a supplement to highlight the flavours in the cup – nothing more, nothing less.

If you’d like to read more (in Danish) the news paper Politiken did a great article on food and coffee recently: http://politiken.dk/ibyen/nyheder/cafeer/ECE2002967/tendens-nu-skal-vi-have-mad-til-kaffen/