by koray hussein
when it comes to coffee in central london, the areas that immediately spring to mind are soho and covent garden with the fitzoria area falling some way behind. however that’s where i headed to earlier this week when i visited great titchfield street’s kaffeine.
i arrived a few minutes before opening time and waited as the four or five workers set up, which kind of surprised me. five people working in a rather small coffee shop at 7.30am? seemed a little overkill to me considering they had more staff than tables but what would i know?
as the interior is so small, the first thing i saw upon entering kaffeine was their counter top which had some seriously good looking snacks packed in. croissants, rolls, pies and an especially tasty looking fruit salad all adorned the glass and made it kind of difficult to decide.
being my usual indecisive self i asked one of the guys behind the counter to help me out and was recommended their breakfast pie (for the life of me, i cannot remember what was in this thing, apart from baked beans and bresola and can’t find it on their website) which i ordered along with a glass of coffee (seriously guys what’s wrong with serving coffee in cups?).
i took a seat at the back wall facing back into the shop and was taken aback at just how tiny kaffeine’s tables are, if you can call wooden boxes, tables. the seats at the back are fine for placing a cup- sorry, glass of coffee on but how the hell am i meant to eat the pie when the table is at arse height when sitting down? there are elevated tables along the central wall but with elevated tables comes elevated seats and as i’m a short bastard, i tend to avoid any seats that make me look like a bearded toddler with my legs dangling down.
after i’d finished internally bitching about the table height i looked up and noticed that theplaceseemed quite busy already. it hadn’t been five minutes since the doors opened and there were two people sitting at the higher tables, a couple sat beside me chatting and a queue of three people. i guess i spoke too soon when i thought that five staff members was overkill at 7.30am.
my attention was brought back to the boxes masquerading as tables once the breakfast pie and coffee arrived and i was left trying to fold myself forward to actually get to the damn pie.
at first glance the breakfast pie looked like it’d be a pretty standard pie but once i tried to actually crack it open and taste this bad boy i realised it wasn’t going to be that simple. whether it was due to the heating process, the actual crust itself, or the blunt cutlery supplied, actually getting inside the pie was a bit of a problem. it took several seconds of prodding, slicing and practically thumping to get at the insides but i’m extremely happy to say that that’s the last complaint you’ll have from me about this pie.
although i (annoyingly) can’t remember what was actually inside, i can remember being surprised with just how savoury and spicy it was. that’s not a complaint however as all the ingredients complimented each other perfectly and i was left even enjoying the crust that tried it’s best to prevent me from having my breakfast.
the coffee on the other hand didn’t strike me as anything special which is a shame. it’s not bad by any means but the fact that it’s a stones throw from places like daisy green and soho bikes is a pity as i’d much rather walk the extra five minutes and get a coffee at one of those places.
i’ll definitely be going back to kaffeine as that pie deserves another visit and if you’re in the area you could do a lot worse than trying kaffeine’s coffee, just don’t expect anything mind blowing.
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