Our roasters, this week’s brews and what’s new at the café.
WAKO is a young French roastery born from a collaboration between Jonathan Le Pautremat, French roasting champion, Obrkof and Typica. The drive: to push classic-profile coffees to their very best, crowd-pleasing and fairly priced. A coffee designed bespoke for the thousands of lattes we serve every month across our coffee shops.
We don’t over-brand our cups, and even our cold drinks go in cardboard cups to take away. Less pretty in a photo, sure, but far better for the planet than the slick plastic cups you see every hundred metres around town. A small thing, but we mean it.
For five years, Fève has been in our grinders and on our shelves. This Parisian roasting workshop showed us the way to excellence: seasonal sourcing, rare varieties, responsible farms and bespoke roasting to bring out the best in every bean. Their standards pulled ours up, and we’re glad to keep serving them.
A café is as much about living as it is about drinking. The barista’s gesture, little Clément sipping on the terrace, a chat on the pavement, the team behind the counter: that’s Typica, day to day.
We’ve been working with Pale for three years. These Poles from Kraków are absolutely mad about coffee, and you can taste it. Poland’s coffee scene is exceptional, the quality bar is incredibly high, and Pale brings a creativity and energy all their own. Coffees that wake you up, regularly on our grinders.
Before Typica, coffee already ran in the family. My ancestors, the Vatinel Brothers, were coffee brokers and roasters in Le Havre until 1975. Their brand, “Café Normandy”, proudly wore a legendary ocean liner. No one took up the torch, and it fills me with pride to work in coffee today. I would have loved to revive Normandy and roast it in Le Havre; the old liberties with names and icons are no longer allowed, but the story lives on, in its own way.
Obrkof is Typica’s big sister: it came first, in 2019, and it’s much bigger. Lisa Champollion, a gifted pastry chef and coffee lover, and Henri Vatinel, who came from fast food and bakery, opened this canteen coffee-shop at the foot of Oberkampf metro. It quickly became a wonderful hangout. And it’s where the cookies and banana bread you find at Typica are baked. Come and visit.