tim's experiment

How, I wonder, did Hong Kong catch the coffee bug? The other day I was in the Wai, the MTR’s downmarket mall for Tai Wai inhabitants (no international brands, no wheeled suitcases) and pondered this mystery: while there are no brands or suitcases there are outlets of Starbucks and Pacific Coffee, together with two serious coffee shops, and one of them offers a menu of exotic beans which you can watch being transformed into nectar at considerable expense.

My favourite cafe in Shatin – five floors up, and so well away from the brands and suitcases – claims that its coffee chef has some international qualification in the matter. Certainly he does a very fine flat white.

Yet Hong Kong is supposed to be a tea place, like the UK of my youth. I really didn’t encounter coffee of any kind until I reached university. Students in those days were not offered any cooking equipment more advanced than a kettle – we did make toast by hanging slices of bread on the bars of the electric fire – and no refrigerator. So the only hot drink was coffee made with instant powder and dried milk. And a lot of sugar.

By the time I reached the world of work there were, I believe, proper coffee shops in London with Italian machinery, but in the North we drank tea.

As Hong Kong people did when I arrived here. Western-style hotels had “coffee shops” but there was nothing particularly sophisticated about the coffee offered there, which traditionally was made by the filter method on an industrial scale, and then sat about on a hotplate slowly becoming undrinkable.

Whether your cup was nice depended on the luck of the draw. If it was recent it might be good, and if not… A local magazine decided to do a comparative review of hotel coffee. The unhappy recipient of the brickbat for the worst local hotel brew responded in an interesting way: they fired their PR person.

On a study visit to Australia in the early 90s my students, and I, were impressed to discover that quite humble street sandwich bars offered a menu of coffee styles – cappucino, latte and so on – which had not really arrived in Hong Kong yet.

Well it duely arrived with multiple openings of the usual suspects: Starbucks and Pac Coffee. But although the menu arrived, generally the lifestyle did not.

Coffee shops, in the Viennese or 18^th century London model, were supposed to be sociable establishments. Newspapers and magazines were provided. They were places for long leisurely chats or reading, catering to a population of regulars. It was a place where “everybody knows your name”.

This did briefly appear when the Baptist University, rightly concluding that academics – as many learned establishments have discovered – have no talent for running catering, invited Pacific Coffee to take over a small space at the south end of our long thin campus which had clearly been designed as some sort of snack bar.

This featured a rather easy-going financial arrangement which did not require either rapid turnover or packing lots of people in, so the space was furnished in a comfortable domestic style featuring soft furniture and even some plump armchairs. It swiftly became the hang-out for occupants of the nearby fine art and communication building. Small meetings could be held there. Early pioneers of remote working used laptops. Antiquated preservers of print read newspapers or books. Random encounters sparked interesting cross-disciplinary conversations.

This did not last. Alerted to the possibility that profits might be appearing the university introduced some form or tendering, and Pacific Coffee were replaced by the other lot. I have nothing against Starbucks, but this was a disaster. Pursuing the theory of profitable coffee shop management Starbucks filled the place with uncomfortable wooden furniture clearly designed to move people on and milk the space.

The complaints which ensued were so loud and bitter that the university eventually offered PC another space on the campus. But this illustrates a problem. Opening a coffee shop is supposed to be about much more than offering a particular kind of hot drink. A coffee shop should aspire to the status of an important social space, a community asset like the English pub or the French estaminet.

But this in turn requires a willingness to forgo that process known in business circles as “sweating the assets.” A traditional coffee shop meets needs outside the simple matter of warm fluid which are difficult to monetise. Efforts to impose or encourage a “minimum spend” or a “maximum stay” are not compatible with the desired ambience.

The situation is not hopeless. Perhaps the present turbulence in the commercial property market will lead to more tolerance for experiments. Perhaps corporate greed will wilt in the face of alert and discriminating consumers. Or perhaps not.