K.C. Peaches, Dublin

Some rooms summon the zeitgeist. Some rooms return you to your youth, because they seem to be so youthful. Some rooms urge you to get to the centre of them, and to stay there for as long as you can. Some rooms are just IT. Some rooms are happening. Some rooms are now. Some rooms are like precious songs from a time in your life when songs spelt out your philosophy for you – you know, like when you first heard Blue Lines, or Murmur, or Merriweather Post Pavilion, or Hot Fuss or I’m Your Man.

KC Peaches, on Dublin’s Nassau Street, is all of those rooms.

Before KCP moved the centre of the universe to just outside Trinity College, the crew and their schtick worked out of an IDA gaffe on Pearse Street. It was as unprepossessing a room in as dull a part of the city as you could imagine. And yet, they made it buzz – the room gave you a lift when you walked in.

Everyone seemed to be sharing a language as well as sharing food and, if you were a stranger, your first reaction was: “I want to be part of this secret. I want to be in on this. I want to speak this language. Where do I start?”

Today, you start by picking up a tray, and heading around the stations where the foods wait for you. KCP is like a canteen from a better world, a heterogenous space that mixes up foods and staff and customers like other great Dublin heterogenous spaces – the Winding Stair; Cornucopia; the Trocadero; Fred Hanna’s bookshop; Chapter One; Dunne & Crescenzi.

Katie Cantwell masterminds KC Peaches by seeming not to mastermind it. She is one of those cool Seattle heads who understands that people should work with you, and not for you, and that confident sense of democracy empowers the staff to be as good as they can be, and that is very, very good indeed.

She also understands that people need to feel that the room they are in is one that they – somehow, mysteriously – actually own. It has to be their room, a place to linger, to make memories, to meet up, to laugh, to be melancholy, to hum that song in your head. KCP gives you the space to do all that, and you get fed as well.

So, I’ll have a cup of Ariosa coffee, please, and a slice of zeitgeist.