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Racoon Coffee & More
Left: The coffee is ‘the baby’ at the Ålesund-based café. Photo: Karoline K Vassenden. Middle: Racoon Coffee & More serves popular healthy foods as well as cakes and cookies. Photo: Andrea Beckmann. Top right: The café is located in an old Jugend house in Ålesund’s town centre, and the owners are keen to help preserve the town life. Photo: Susanne Finnes. Right: The café also has a licence to serve alcoholic beverages and stays open until 11pm every Friday. Photo: Susanne Finnes.
Preserving town life one coffee at a time With a strong urge to create something entirely from scratch at the same time as helping to save the town centre and supporting its local businesses, Racoon Coffee & More in Ålesund is passionate about both coffee and its home town. By Line Elise Svanevik | Photos: Racoon Coffee
Opening at 7.30am, the café – which has a clientele ranging from school kids to pensioners – aims to serve the people of Ålesund and its visitors the very best coffee around, mixed with healthy foods, cakes and alcoholic beverages on the side. “The coffee is our baby,” says co-owner Anette Finnes, who opened the café with Linn Therese Briksdal Dimmen in March 2015. Having worked together in a café in a shopping centre, the pair decided it was time to create something they were passionate about, which is how Racoon Coffee & More was born. “A lot of people in town already knew who we were because of our previous job, so they’ve all been immensely sup28 | Issue 104 | September 2017
portive,” explains Finnes. “Town centres in Norway are dying out, and that’s why we decided to open up in town – to hold onto the town centre of Ålesund for as long as possible. The streets are never empty and there are plenty of activities, so it makes sense to be here.”
Supporting local Besides the coffee, which is sourced from Supreme Roastworks in Oslo, the café handpicks its suppliers to be as local as possible. Some pastries are baked on-site and others are from the nearby bakery Mandel & Melis. The meat is from the butchers Hole Kjøtt and the chocolate from Pralina, based in Ålesund. “For our ingredients, we only travel as far as Oslo and Trondheim,” says Finnes.
“We want to be urban and follow the trends, so we have a great deal of healthy options like smoothies, chia porridge and salads, but we also serve cakes and cookies. Instead of just copying trends, we follow them and put our own spin on them – we’d rather be the trendsetters, so we do a lot of talking and brainstorming to make that happen.” The café is located right by the steps that take visitors up to the viewpoint Fjellstua in an old Jugend house, and the owners explain that they have created jobs that they love going to. “We run this purely on passion – that’s why we have such a big focus on quality. We help our local community and pull each other up – that’s what everyone here does,” says Finnes.
Web: www.racoon.no Instagram: @racooncoffee