About Coffeeangel.

I came back to Belfast from Canada in 1994, a newly graduated photojournalist, to cover the IRA ceasefire. I freelanced for a year. Then, on the afternoon of 12 July 1995, while I was photographing an Orange parade on the Ormeau Road, I was grabbed by the UVF, a loyalist paramilitary group, and walked down an alley for a conversation I have not forgotten. Nothing came of it beyond a fright, but it was enough to make me think hard about photojournalism as a career, and about what I actually wanted to do with my days.

I put the cameras away for what was meant to be a few months and went back to the work that had paid my way through college: bars, restaurants and cafés. Two things became clear fairly quickly. I loved the trade, the pace of it and the people. And Belfast, for all its qualities, had nowhere you could sit down with a properly made cup of coffee.

So in 1996 I found the right spot, counted the people passing the door, wrote a fifty-page business plan and brought it to a bank near Queen’s. The manager heard me out. Then she said something I have repeated many times since.

“This is Belfast, and we drink tea. I have no faith in this idea of a coffee shop. But I have faith in you.”

She approved the loan. The Ground Floor opened in 1997, into a city where nobody knew what a latte was. Friends was on television every week, and Central Perk did some of the work for us. The rest we did ourselves. I printed little cards with every drink spelled out phonetically, a small drawing of the cup showing how much was espresso and how much was milk, and a line on what it tasted like, so that nobody had to feel awkward ordering. We opened seven days a week, eight in the morning until midnight. It was busy from the first week.

I met Caroline that year. She was a customer at the Ground Floor, and I went weak at the knees every time she walked through the door. It turned out she was a friend of one of our baristas, which is how I got her number and asked her out. She had a career of her own in international marketing, and a history that rhymed with mine: born in Lebanon to an Irish mother and a Lebanese father, she and her siblings had been sent to their grandmother in Sligo as children to get away from the war. My parents had taken us to Canada in the 1970s for much the same reason. Belfast was good to us both, but the summers were still incendiary, with troops on the streets and the marching season bringing out the worst in people, and for Caroline especially that was a hard thing to live beside. So when an offer came for the shop, less than two years after it opened, we took it and moved to Dublin.

In 2000 I opened a restaurant, and lost the lot. It was Caroline who kept us standing. We married in 2006, and in 2015 she joined Coffeeangel as co-owner and marketing director. A good deal of what has grown since has her hand on it.

What came next is the part I am proudest of, though it did not feel that way at the time. My uncle Frank lent me enough to buy a converted three-wheeled coffee cart, and on St Patrick’s Day 2004 I opened it at the end of the pier in Howth. The sun was out, the queue never seemed to end, and I felt I was back doing what I was meant to do. I had promised Caroline, and myself, that there would be no more bricks and mortar until the site was right for what Coffeeangel was meant to be: good coffee, with a little something else.

So while the Celtic Tiger roared through Dublin, I stayed outside. Seven years on the cart, through wind, rain and snow, winning the Irish Barista Championship in 2006 and slowly building the name. Then the crash came in 2008, and by 2011 the rents had fallen and the city had empty shops in it. That was our opportunity. We opened Coffeeangel on South Anne Street as a three-month pop-up. It is still there.

Coffeeangel grew from that pop-up. Along the way we have been lucky with the baristas who have stood behind our machines, a good number of whom now run cafés of their own. The Irish Times has been kind enough to call me the father of the Irish specialty coffee scene. I will take the compliment, but the truth is it took a great many people, and most of all it took the customers who kept coming back. Ten cafés on, we are still trying to do what we did on the cart: look after people, and brew the best coffee we can.

— Karl Purdy, founder