So, there's no coffee to be had from The Gutter Bookshop... with a great cafe (if not 3!) just around the corner and a bakery next door I decided that there was plenty of good coffee on tap in the local area (and no doubt, I'll be drinking a lot of it...)
That leaves plenty of room for some great Cookery books in the shop which will get you all baking before you know it - favourites of mine at the minute are 'The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook' and 'Avoca Tea Time' - if you've got a sweet tooth you'll be in heaven...
I had a very interesting chat with a man about coffee last week. As I was putting together the final details for the business plan I thought I should do some further research on coffee machines, coffee supplies etc. and so off I went to SHOP 2006, an annual retail exhibition particularly aimed at food and drink suppliers here in Dublin.
Over a very pleasant black americano (espresso with added hot water for the uninitiated) I presented my plans for The Gutter Bookshop, and the kind of coffee I thought we should be serving. Having discussed types of machines (they can get very expensive!) we moved onto different coffee blends. The interesting thing was that, although there is only about 10 cent (6 and a half pence if you're in sterling) difference per cup between a cheap blend and an expensive blend, most retailers went for a cheaper blend in order to maximise profit as they could effectively charge the same as everyone else. All good business sense you might say as the majority of us aren't connoisseurs, but if you're like me you go back to the place where the coffee was good.
Anyway, long story short, we'll be serving a good cup from a good machine because I truly believe that it will pay off in the long run.
This is where we talk about coffee. Which is fine when the shop is open and running and we're serving up a beautiful cupful every other minute but at the moment it's a bit hard to know what to say, maybe I should just drift off into a visionary moment for a minute...
...Imagine coming in through the front door of a small bookshop, there's a table of bestselling books on a table in front of you. On the walls surrounding you there's more books, covering fiction, biography, current affairs, travel and all those other things you might want to read about. But the first thing that hits you is the scent of freshly brewed coffee. There's a few tables scattered around (remember we're talking about a small bookshop here!) and there's a bit of chilled out music playing in the background... I'm thinking Chet Baker, maybe Julie London, bit of Ella now and again. Upstairs, or maybe down, there's a secondhand section which will give you more book for your money - I'm counting on the €2 section to go down a treat.
I think it could work... do you? Drop us a line...
