When you sit in certain rooms, you feel you are at the centre of the action, in the eye of the tiger.
3fe, on Grand Canal Street in Dublin, feels like that, and, as you sit there drinking your brilliant flat white and having excellent avocado and scrambled eggs with spinach on toast, you try to work out why the place is so pulsing, so in-the-moment.
Then it hits you, as you listen to the guys explain in expert detail the characteristics of the drinks they are serving, that what animates this space is the service. The staff are cool, expert, polite, and authoritative. They are on top of their game, confident as Roger Federer, assured as Lionel Messi, with as much time to get the job done as Serena Williams serving with a set up and a break of service. They make it look easy, even though what they do is hard, difficult and precise, and is actually fairly repetitious.
Except you get the sense for them that it isn't repetitious, and this may be the key to their charm. With each cup of joe, they are aiming for the stars. This isn't push-button-serve-customer. This is create-beauty-every-time, which is why we use the analogies with sportsmen and women, people who must find the beauty in effort, in practice, in repetition, a beauty that is born in graft, but which enriches and entertains our lives.
What Colin Harmon and his crew do in 3fe is a thing of beauty.
32 Grand Canal Street Lower, Dublin 2 www.3fe.com
John McKenna makes with the sporting metaphors to describe 3fe.
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