INTERVIEW
“PEOPLE JUST OPEN COFFEE SHOPS THINKING THEY ARE GOOD BUSINESS. THEN THEY WONDER WHY IT FAILS”
18 The Blend December 2017
InterviewDec.indd 18
completely silent. As it starts to run it starts to fatten, then it starts to thin, and it sounds like someone peeing. For me, there’s too much water coming through at this point, so I always stop when I start to hear the ‘pee’. I’m not timing it – I’m taking notice of what’s happening.” In the same vein, Marco believes the speciality coffee industry’s sometimes over-the-top attention to detail makes it look unprofessional. “I’m not a chef, but I can cook a steak. I don’t need to take the temperature of the frying pan; I don’t need to time it when I put it in the pan, turn it over and time it again. If a chef watched you cook like that, they would think you were an amateur. “When people say they are wetting the Chemex paper to get rid of the papery taste, it’s bullshit. What we found is that if you look at it under an electron microscope, wetting the filter makes it expand and become a better filter – it makes the paper easier to handle. It’s got nothing to do with the paper taste, but somebody’s said something and it’s been picked up, and that annoys me.” “I want to do a ‘university of coffee’ where the customer comes in and we tell them they can have whatever they want,” he says. “Rather than fighting the large coffee chains and the ‘we will do anything you want’ line, we’re saying, look, if you want a skinny, dry whatever, then I’ll show
you how it’s made – because when you show someone, they realise it’s rubbish. If you want to make dry foam, alright, let’s throw some milk together and leave it on the side for 20 minutes. Do you want to drink that? Dry foam is just old foam. I think the best way to kill this trend is to take the public through it.” Bar Termini Marco’s Bar Termini shops in London – one in Soho, the other just off Oxford Street – are a world away from the large coffee chains. An exaggerated version of a Fifties Italian bar and coffee shop, they open early in the morning for the coffee rush, and continue late into the night. The tables are block-booked in slots – people are keen to come in and sample the home-made alcohol, enjoy the expertly concocted cocktails and experience the feel of a proper Italian coffee shop. “Tony Conigliaro is from Sicily, I’m from Turin, this is just everything we agreed on,” says Marco. “There was a lot that we didn’t agree on. In Italy, we were as far away from each other as possible – London is nearer to Turin than Sicily is. Coffee shops have got the wrong attitude, and – don’t take this negatively, I hope you understand where I’m coming from – people just open coffee shops thinking they are good business, without doing much research. They go to a show, they buy the coffee machine, the fridge, the sandwiches, everything, then they open. And then they don’t understand when it fails. “People in the bar industry, on the other hand, tend to look at what’s missing in an area, work out what sort of place they would want to go to, and open that up. There seems to be a bit more thought and professionalism there. “I would like to see more creativity in the industry,” he goes on. “Bar Termini is a late-night bar in Soho. We’d been talking about a bar/coffee concept where each offering was as strong as the other – not a place where barmen are trying to do coffee or baristas are trying to make cocktails. That would be like letting waitresses cook, it wouldn’t work. What we’re trying to do here is a concept that pays the bills. I’ve got £100,000 rent and only 25 chairs – I needed to do something spectacular.”
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15/11/2017 15:40