| Jun 21, 2012
Actually, my background is media and advertising. When a friend of mine gave me an espresso machine, I didn’t know what to do with it so I started to search online and got some coffee beans to taste and… wow. It was a lot different from the big chain stores where I’d usually get my coffee. I quit my job and went to Australia to work in a café and brought back all the ideas with me to Hong Kong. It was difficult at the beginning, but fun in a way. I was constantly worried about whether people would like…[our] different brewing methods.
As I said earlier, we’re not [just] a café. We also do business for other cafés as well, so they’re not our competitors at all. They’re our customers. We supply beans and equipment for them, as well as training if they want to push it to another level. I know people in Hong Kong are screaming for options when it comes to coffee. I’m not saying chain stores are not good. They really pushed coffee in Hong Kong because of their easy access—people can buy coffee wherever—but there aren’t a lot of options. I’m not saying they’re bad, but people have their own preferences. We take care of our beans, where they come from, how they’re roasted… we take care of how we brew it, which is something chain stores can’t do because they have so much staff and can’t really make sure they’re making good coffee. They use automatic machines and they don’t know what happens in the process. People don’t want to pay that much for coffee they don’t like, so quality is the number-one thing for us.
People are screaming for good coffee. One of the big things is that the coffee culture here is growing and more people are drinking coffee. If you’re not doing a good job, you can forget about it. People are not going to go back to that shop. Hong Kong, especially in the last two years, has gone from no cafés to a lot opening up. A common trend in Hong Kong is that when something pops up and grows fast, it will [also] die down fast. However, coffee is not something that you can copy. It depends on your machines and brewing methods. Taiwanese milk tea, for example, is very easy. They just give you the recipe and you can make it.
Check out RabbitHole at 2/F, 26 Cochrane St., Central, 2581-0861.
