Curators Coffee

Curators Coffee Studio
9a Cullum Street
London EC3M 7JJ

The gentle clatter of the train as people respectfully stay apart as best they can. One or two have no mask but one gives them the benefit of the doubt (aside from maybe the bloke on the phone who's just being loud and obnoxious) and you could be forgiven for thinking this is the norm and always has been. To say I'm nervous about travelling into London would be wrong, I took the train in a couple of times during peak pandemic for less than scrupulous interviewers who decided they knew better than government or scientists in the circumstances, but I'm certainly not comfortable. I think that's mostly because of the sense of something just not being quite right. The surroundings and settings are the same but there are less people and their actions are predictable but not what I have come to expect from commuting in and out of London. It should be grubby and overcrowded and frustrating but this is almost, very almost, pleasant and that is highly disconcerting.

I have a meeting to head to. My latest foray into employment (hopefully longer than the last few, but I daren't promise myself that this will be the case) sees me working from home but still needing to get into London when group presentations are called for and this is the first (and hopefully last) time it has come up. Rather than turn my attentions to meeting colleagues and how best I should go about note taking, I focus on a pressing issue that's been bothering me all week. Where to get coffee?

It needs to be specialty, that's probably a given at this stage, but it's been so long since I've been into London and I've not particularly hung around the area around Monument too much. I could opt for one as soon as I step out of Liverpool Street. There's Dartbrooke Coffee almost directly opposite the station but since that was the last place I visited in London before the latest lockdown, it feels too neat, too cyclical for me. Taylor Street Baristas that used to jut out from a side street across the road, as if you were heading towards Spitalfields market, is now long gone, washed away by the tides of competition and capitalism. I decide to roll the dice and head to my intended destination first, then reverse engineer my way to coffee by seeing what is within a reasonable enough distance that I can get there and back before the doors open. A risky strategy but it could open up new and exciting opportunities and I'm won over by the possibility of discovering a gem.

`The office stands in the shadow of the monstrous Walkie-Talkie. A giant edifice of glass and greed, a towering effigy of a childhood toy made building for the sake of uniqueness and just adding to the incongruity of most of the modern structures going up. I switch to my coffee seeking app and find one thing hidden away in a melange of backstreets and side alleys.

A tiny little space that sits in a shopfront; that is to say it is a cafe in it's own right but the space itself is that of what would be the window dressing for many others in the area. I recognise it, I have been here before, in a life prior to writing about every caffeinated beverage to pass my lips, a life before YouTube videos and coffee reviews but not before I knew that I had to seek out the best for my own self-satisfied interests.

Curators Coffee is so small it has a breakfast bar pressed up against the window large enough to squeeze three people next to each other should they not be bothered about social distancing, and the serving area that holds the required machinery. Still, it is stuffed with plants and a cold-drinks cabinet, and more than one member of staff in an impressive display of space efficiency and mobile dexterity. I'm pretty sure they weren't serving Send coffee, a company that helps those with disabilities and special needs into the coffee industry, the last time I was here but the silkiness of the oat flat-white I order is something I have craved for so long. For months I've almost exclusively been drinking from my local shop, Herts Coffee Lab, but as brilliant as they can be, sometimes a man can desire change. The sweet berry, the slight zing of acidity and a balancing act of bitterness just to top it off. Yes, it's good to be back in London, if only for the coffee.