Soon after coming to France, well before The Stray Bean saw the light of day, I found myself working for a company in their offices just on the edge of Paris. Nice work environment. Comfortable, air-conditioned, carpeted, clean, modern, fully-equipped offices with lifts that worked, ergonomic chairs and a cantine that served up decent three-course hot meals for lunch every day. Nothing to complain about at all. Was there? After spending just a few days there, I realised that there was something disturbing about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it first. Then it hit me: it looked exactly the same as an office you could find pretty much anywhere in the world. There was nothing French about it at all, let alone Parisian. France must be one of the most visually distinctive countries in the world. Parisian streets look unmistakably Parisian, even if you can’t see the Eiffel Tower in the background. The French brasserie has its own style, like no other bar or pub or restaurant from anywhere else. Post a selfie of yourself on holidays having an espresso at an outdoor table of a French street café and you won’t need to tell your friends what country you’re in. We all love it. Visitors flock in by the tens of millions every year to soak it all up. But my new place of work was completely banal. Internationally sanitised. No signs of any particular culture, no character, just a few personal photos and objects on people’s desks – hardly enough to upset the feeling of sleek, homogeneous, efficient professionalism. It screamed “sameness”, not diversity. As I did in my daily corporate attire, for that matter. That impression stayed with me and was still in the back of my mind when I set up The Stray Bean a few years later. I wanted a place that was, well, not The Office. One great thing I’ve always loved about independent coffee shops is that they’re all different. They have their own personality. The way they look and feel depends on who created it, even if there might be an architect involved somewhere along the line. They don’t obey a set of standardised rules. People just create something they like themselves. Well, that’s what I did anyway. Luckily it turned out pretty much the way I wanted. When all was ready to go and the opening approached, I liked the feel of it. I guess I was just hoping that other people would too. But I didn’t know. There were never any market studies. The only thing I could guarantee is that it would be an individual creation, a little bit different from anywhere else. It’s still true today, though now that individual experience is as much about the people who work there and the people who come as it is about me. Which is just as it should be.
I remember clearly the first specialty espresso coffee I ever had. It was at St ALi in South Melbourne, a place that’s not far off being world famous in coffee shop circles. My cousin, who was in the green coffee importing business and a coffee festival judge at the time, had taken me there. He asked the waitress about the coffee of the day and was told all sorts of details, like what country, region and producer it came from, the arabica variety and its tasting characteristics. It all seemed a tad excessive for a simple espresso. I didn’t really pay too much attention and I don’t recall any of it now. What I do recall is the first sip. I was amazed by how much flavour it had, how complex those flavours were and the lack of bitterness. Suddenly, the world of great coffee had opened up with all its possibilities. An endless variety of aromas, flavours and textures, each coffee with its unique profile depending on where it’s from and how it’s dried, roasted and brewed. How, I wondered, could anyone be satisfied with all that ordinary – or plain awful – bitter, tasteless burnt stuff out there, after experiencing great specialty coffee? Naturally, at The Stray Bean, we want you to feel the same way. So we could get disappointed if we serve you your first specialty coffee and it doesn’t make you go “Wow!”; we could roll our eyes if you ask for sugar, which will mask some of those natural aromas; and we could get downright offended if you tell us that you prefer the coffee from your local bar, which surely MUST be no good! Then we could start telling you how wrong you are. We could, but we don’t. If that were our reaction, it would be our problem, not yours. We don’t expect everyone to have the same passions. And we know that trying to teach a lesson about anything to anyone who hasn’t asked for it will most likely make them less interested instead of more. If you come here for a great coffee and you ask us about it, we’ll be delighted to talk. But there are plenty of other reasons to come too, and we’ll be just as delighted. And if you start telling us about your passion instead of the other way around, maybe we’ll be the ones doing the learning. Oh, all right then. There is just one thing we might ask. Next time you drop by, if you are in the habit of putting sugar in your coffee, it is available, but before you toss it in, do try the coffee without it first. Just a sip. Maybe you’ll be as surprised as I was all those years ago at St ALi. I couldn’t help giving you that one piece of unsolicited advice – there is a coffee purist in me after all. The good thing is that, now it’s out of the way, you’re free to do what you like!
They didn’t knock, they didn’t ask permission, they just walked in off the street, right through the door as if it was their own home! Such a ridiculous thought that fleeted through my mind when The Stray Bean’s first ever customers, a New Zealand family of four, wandered in. I mean, that’s the whole idea, getting people to walk through that door, and I’d just succeeded in doing it for the very first time! Ridiculous, but maybe not as surprising as all that. I’d just spent a year getting the project going, with plans, approvals, builders, equipment deliveries, and so on, building a space that would make people feel good about being there. Like building a home. And if it were a home, you’d be putting locks on the doors and deciding who was coming in and who wasn’t. And if you had a lot of money, you’d have chosen a quiet, exclusive area with little risk of noise and other disturbances that human life can cause. And the wall around your house would be taller, and the security system tighter. You protect. You isolate. The Stray Bean is the opposite of all that. Anyone can walk in off the street, come in, sit down and get a good coffee for just a few euros. No filtering, no reservations, no judgement. We have people from all walks of life coming through, from artists to accountants, business leaders to the unemployed, school kids to grandparents, and locals we’ve now known for five years to tourists from all around the world. You’re all strays to us. If you want a great coffee, we’ll have it for you. Or if you want something else, we’ll have plenty of other good things to offer you too. That’s what we do. But what matters most is that, once you’ve walked in that door, you’re glad you’ve come. We will be too. That was always the whole idea – I just took a few minutes on that first day of opening in 2017 to realise it myself.
