Coffee trio perking up London’s caffeine addicts using premium brew with a phew

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Stefan Allesch-Taylor’s coffee shops are up against giants like Starbucks or Caffè Nero. But “we don’t see them as competition”, says the Square Mile veteran, who set up the Department of Coffee and Social Affairs in 2010.

That’s because a greater number of caffeine addicts are happy to pay more for a cup that packs a punch and arguably doesn’t taste like dishwater. The rise in artisan coffee — and indeed in cafés across the capital — has had a similar trajectory to the explosion of craft gin and beer in recent years, whereby the quality of the product tends to be ahead of big brand rivals, albeit for a premium price.

Allesch-Taylor is part of this new wave. Today, he boasts 21 coffee shops in London, Manchester, Bristol and Chicago. “When people get up in the morning, they take the simple attitude, ‘I don’t care if North Korea has fired a weapon, I have three minutes to get myself a flat white’,” says the founder. “That passion for their affordable luxury isn’t going away.”

Almost all of their customers return day after day for their caffeine fix, he claims. A regular Americano is £2.65.

The financier set up shop after several of his ventures, mostly in financial services, were hit by the economic crash. “The world was not spinning as it should, and I, like many others, was caught up in a disaster of biblical proportions,” he explains. “I didn’t put a penny in [in the early days].” He racked up debt on his credit cards instead to get the business off the ground.

It was ticking along with just two shops, in Leather Lane Market and Carnaby Street, when he passed on the baton to chief executive Ashley Lopez, who was just 24 at the time. It was 2011. She had been working at Fairfax, his former investment bank in Mayfair, after having graduated from Queen Mary University with a masters in law and finance in 2010.

“She is an entrepreneur in a truer vein than I am,” says Allesch-Taylor, who is not involved in the day-to-day running of the business.

Lopez, who hails from Chicago, has grown the business with no outside investment and looks after a 200-strong team. She plans to open more shops at home and overseas, and expand the membership club, a workspace-cum-coffee-shop with a £1359 annual fee.

“The hardest thing was going through that growth and sticking with it,” said Lopez. “Now we have all the team on the bus in the right seats.”

In November, the firm gobbled up smaller rival TAP and its four London cafés in Wardour Street, Tottenham Court Road, Russel Square and Rathbone Place. Its parent company is Docasa, which is listed on OTC Markets Group in New York. Turnover should reach £8 million this year, Allesch-Taylor reckons, although the venture has yet to turn a profit. “It’s growing rapidly,” he adds.