Alex Mello of Double Shot Coffee Company on growing up in Brazil, learning the ropes at Starbucks and opening his own perfect café
I have been in London for 11 years now. The place I come from is called Londrina, in the south of Brazil. It was named after London and the very first mayor was English. The English were the first to settle there in numbers when they built the railroads to transport the coffee beans which were the basis of the region’s initial success. The area became quite famous for its coffee beans for a while, but the terrain is really too low to grow the best coffee, so production soon moved to higher ground in central Brazil. My father initially farmed coffee, but he had to switch from coffee to cattle and soya in the end because he lost several coffee crops due to sudden drops in temperature at just the wrong time.
We opened the Double Shot Coffee Company on Tavistock Street on 26th November. It has been great. I didn’t want the shop to be too formal or have that kind of “too cool” vibe that can make some people feel intimidated. I wanted it to feel much more like your living room on a Sunday morning. That is why you see magazines scattered around the shop and the chairs are the kind that you can relax in. We like the fact that we are slightly off the main highway – it helps to create this informal feel. It is the kind of place that we want people to think of as their own. After only a couple of months we have regulars from the local area who use us as a meeting place or just to drop by. We also have a kitchen here, so we bake many of the pastries that we sell here every day. Things are still new, so the range of foods we make on the premises will increase over time.
The base of the coffee we sell is a blend of Guatemalan and Brazilian beans. We are going to start holding regular tastings where people can try a combination of different coffee and food. We sell about six or seven different types of coffee, made in different ways – such as French press or espresso – so people will be able to try different combinations. There will be chocolate, of course – which everyone knows can go really well with coffee – but there will also be other things like cheese, fruit, mushrooms. There are some coffee-food combinations that will really surprise. For example coffee and mushrooms will sound quite bizarre to many people but with the right combination it will taste wonderful. There is just so much behind coffee, and this might be a way to introduce the different types and the cultures that produce them. Brazilian and Columbian coffee, for example, will be very different to each other and will go with different foods and different moods. We will be using the same coffee that we sell in the shop, so if somebody finds a combination that they really like they will be able to recreate it at home.
