The Kaffa Beans Café in Silicone Oasis is nothing less than a revelation, a true hidden gem. And I am totally smitten.
But let’s start with a story, shall we –
The Kaffa province in ancient Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, is fabled to be the original home of the Arabica coffee plant. An article in the in-flight magazine of Ethiopian Airlines recounts an event in Ethiopia’s ancient history where “an Abyssinian goatherd, Kaldi, who lived around AD 850, discovered coffee. He observed his goats prancing excitedly and bleating loudly after chewing the bright red berries that grew on some green bushes nearby. Kaldi tried a few berries himself, and soon felt a sense of elation. He filled his pockets with the berries and ran home to announce his discovery. At his wife’s suggestion, he took the berries to the Monks in the monastery near Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile River”. Now that would never have happened in our home. If I came back highly elated, bleating from eating red berries from any of bush, no matter what colour, my wife would beat the living daylights out of me.
But a certain Ethiopian Emirates Captain thought this story, and I’ve only told you half of it, would make a fantastic platform for his coffee shop, hence the Kaffa Beans Café. The place is as much a coffee connoisseur’s wet dream as it is Mecca to die-hard coffee fanatics. And these fly boys know how to push all the right buttons; they don’t just blend their own coffee, they roast it too…right there in a dedicated roasting room in the back. I kid you not. It’s so cool. And as if that weren’t enough they have an assortment of coffee makers, the likes of which I have never seen, all over the place; everything from simple dip percolators to French presses to complex contraptions which wouldn’t look out of place in Dexter’s laboratory. But all of this would mean zip if they couldn’t translate all that obvious passion and expertise into a decent cup of coffee. They do, boy-o-boy they do. I say this with hand on heart, I’ve had the best cup of coffee in all my 51-years at the Kaffa Beans Café.
I went on to have a wonderful breakfast of perfectly done poached eggs on freshly baked biscuits, dressed with a beautiful Hollandaise Sauce and a rose flower of smoked salmon on the side – hello baby.
The Kaffa Beans Café in Silicone Oasis is nothing less than a revelation, a true hidden gem. And I am totally smitten…
Waste NOT. Want NOT.