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You smell the fragrant aroma of the coffee being roasted well before walking into Truth Coffee in Buitenkant Street in the Cape Town city centre – that hip steampunk palace where brewing the perfect cup is far more than just an art.
The relationship that David Donde has with coffee is not something you’d call a religion – with its requirement for regular ritual and worship, it is more what you’d call an obsession.
The man is intense. His pitch-black eyes are unwavering. He doesn’t answer questions so much as reinvent them so that he’s telling you what he wants you to hear.
“We believe that making the best possible coffee is a matter of buying the best, and staying out of its way,” he says without blinking, and then adds: “I was looking for a word that distilled what was good in coffee. And the word distillation is quite chemical in nature – it’s got negative connotations. Eventually I had this epiphany of ‘truth in the cup’. And ‘truth’ was the word.”
Donde’s moustache is waxed, his black fedora matches his black shirt and, of course, he rocks the obligatory well-worn jeans – which are Levis. In case you’re wondering, he washes his Levis, and doesn’t freeze them, which is the hipster alternative to the front loader. We’re sitting in a booth at the back of Truth Coffee, where the conversation begins somewhat philosophically.
“I came from an engineering and then industrial design background. I started with the belief that if you build a better mousetrap the world would beat a path to your door – as one does. And the reality is, if you build a better mousetrap, nobody cares. Just because your coffee is better than anyone else’s coffee, doesn’t cause a glut of interest in your product, because most people don’t know enough to care.”
But things are different now. People do know, and judging by the crowd in Truth Coffee when Finweek visited, they do care. Six years after being founded, Truth has received international recognition as one of the world’s top artisanal roasters.
The coffee shop, with its retro-industrial-steampunk décor, was named by a top MSN Travel writer as “The best coffee shop in the world” – and it could possibly lay claim to being the most photographed in the world, having featured on coffee specialist sites like Sprudge.com as well as art blogs like Colossal (thisiscolossal.com) and Yatzer.com.
Most recently, Truth was placed at first position in UK news agency The Telegraph’s selection of ‘the world’s best coffee shops’ — a list that includes cafés in London, Istanbul, Paris, Vienna and Nashville.
Something very different
The décor for the Buitenkant Street roastery and coffee shop was created by Cape Town’s multi-award-winning designer Haldane Martin, who said he was inspired by the industrial space as well as the steampunk appearance of many of the coffee machines. Soon after launching, Truth became the first African venue ever to be shortlisted for the World Restaurant and Bar Design awards.
The look is all steampunk. A form of literature that envisages a parallel future without internal combustion or nuclear power, steampunk is that fantasy-cum-science-fiction genre where everything is run by steam. It’s more than that, however, as its aesthetic often borrows from Victorian gothic styling – brass and bronze knobs and levers, ingenious clockwork contraptions and amazing airships.
The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction reckons that steampunk is also known as retrofuturism, and states: “the term is usually applied to an array of pop-culture ephemera from the early to mid-twentieth century, from robot toys to shark-finned hovercrafts, pulp magazine covers to architectural utopias”.
Step inside the Truth coffee shop, and you have a sense of stepping onto the set of a film like The Wild, Wild West or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Even the baristas and waiters sport Victorian-era hats and leather goggles. The greeter at the door is decked out in a waistcoat, tails and top hat, and he carries a carved walking stick.
A caffeinated legend is born
Truth was founded in 2009 by Dave Donde and Andrzej Janik. The third member of the management team, Richard Kelland, joined the team over two years ago and became a partner last year. Kelland is in charge of customer relationships, Janik is chairman and handles operations, and Donde is in charge of marketing.
“We run the company quite differently to other artisanal coffee companies, because first and foremost we believe in the coffee, and the flavour of the coffee, not just coffee for its own sake. Secondly we run it as a company. And we run a professional company – we’re not a bunch of guys in the garage hoping for the best,” he explains.
The coffee shop is not the main business of Truth – the company primarily roasts coffee for consumption in restaurants, hotels and coffee shops.
This excerpt is from an article that originally appeared in the 9 July 2015 edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here.
