“Left to have coffee at Roasted Brown”.
That's Caroline Hennessy, describing the trusted technique of how to rescue a bad lunch in Dublin city centre: get yourself to Roasted Brown, and salvage the day with a cup of Don Mayo, from Costa Rica.
Mind you, what might be just as helpful to rescue the day is the bonhommie, and the smiles and welcome of Ferg Brown, Rob Lewis and the team, upstairs on Curved Street in Temple Bar. The RB guys don't come across like coffee geeks – no patented beards or protuberant baldness that we could see – and they are voluble, and open with their knowledge. That Don Mayo is a natural process, for instance, but when you 'fess up that you don't know what natural process means, Ferg Brown explains the process simply, quickly, concisely, and uncondescendingly. And he does it with a smile. He could be a favourite teacher, no problem.
(Lesson time: natural process is where coffee beans are dried in the original manner, with the beans being dried with all their layers intact. This gives more exotic berry flavours, but the profile of the coffee can be inconsistent, so you need more nous to get it just right).
And nous is what Mr Brown, fellow barista Rob Lewis (“That Rwandan Kamiro should comes across as digestive biscuit in the flat white, and as lemon followed by bergamot in the black coffee”), and the RB team have. “A haven for coffee, community, and art that is at once comfortable and cutting-edge... a rousing success” panted National Geographic. RB collects accolades on what seems to be a weekly basis. If it's National Geographic this week, it was the FT a fortnight ago, and The Irish Times in between and the accolades are always double-edged: killer coffee, yes, and what charming dudes.
There was a street cart with a canopy and a lot of festivals and street events before the move to the Filmbase in January 2012, and the creation of the Roasted Brown metiér: superlative coffees treated with exacting precision and due respect, and served alongside tasty lunch and brunch dishes, in what they themselves accurately call a “creative space”.
For anyone of a certain age who can recall the original intentions of the Temple Bar scene, Roasted Brown is like Mecca: this model of a democratic, artistic, unselfconscious space with world class skills at play is what everyone wanted to achieve back in the day, before the pubs took over. Roasted Brown has an importance that goes beyond the brilliance of its coffee, for the team here are defining the future.
John McKenna
