Starting Up with Rob Tudgey @ Coffeesmith, Witney

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking, please fasten your seatbelts as we make our approach to Newark Airport, estimated landing time is 1100 hours.”

So started a crazy 60-hour long weekend for my wife Sarah and me back in June this year.

And that was also the start of Coffeesmith, our café, bar and shop which opened in Langdale Court in Witney at the beginning of September.

After 17 years working in the hospitality industry in London and more recently West Oxfordshire, where we’ve lived for five years, I decided to finally take the plunge and open my own place.

Much of it was motivated by a desire to be my own boss and be able to make my own decisions. It was also motivated selfishly by a desire to have exceptional coffee and customer service in Witney.

So Sarah and I decided that to do this properly, we had to do our research. We are the sort of people who will travel far for good food and a decent cup of joe, so New York didn’t seem too much of a stretch!

We explored the finest hospitality that great city has to offer – we visited a long list of the best coffee shops and roasteries in the city as well as discovering some hot spots of our own like the amazing smorgasburg food market overlooking the river in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

The customer service culture over there really blew us away. Everybody spoke to us and engaged with us even when ordering a simple cup of coffee. This kind of hospitality makes such a huge difference to the customer experience. Even our annual family holiday to France this year involved visiting the best coffee shops in Paris and talking to owners there about their experiences.

We found some good pieces for the shop there too, including our table tops which are 17th-century flooring panels and our magnificent ‘Iff’, a metal drying rack for wine bottles, which my parents shared their car with on a long drive back from Carcassonne!

We came back really inspired and ready to start work on the café.

Testing food and drink from local suppliers has been a strain on the waistband but we’ve loved the creative challenges in honing a menu and finding products that have been produced with love and care by people we know and have built relationships with such as Michelle at Southdown Farm in Witney, Samuelsons soft drinks, Patrick Strainge Butchery and the guys at UE Coffee and Upton Smokery and even further afield at Charles Smith Wines from Washington State in the US.

We also had fun commissioning mugs of the Witney skyline.

Inevitably, you will hit snags along the way. In our case we hit obstacles such as discovering that we needed to rewire the premises, as well as fridges not fitting properly because the measurements on the website were wrong and a whole host of other things. Just when you get to the end and the finishing line is almost in sight, that’s when you really have to hunker down and keep going. And once you get there of course, you realise that it wasn’t a finishing line at all, it was actually the start.

A very early start for me as I get up at 5am most days now to bake and make sure that the deli fridge is stocked with delicious produce and the counters (recycled teak from Oxford Wood Recycling, of course) are groaning with freshly baked buns, cakes, and what we believe to be the finest sausage rolls in Oxfordshire!

We also do lunch deliveries to local businesses and are available for private parties in the shop too so we are kept busy. The reward is in the smiles of the customers and the joy of friendships made and sustained day after day working in our own community. Many local businesses and traders have been immeasurably helpful and kind to us on our journey so far and made us realise how lucky we are to live and work in Witney.

TRY IT
Coffeesmith, 
1 Langdale Court, Witney
01993 704443 @CoffeesmithRob

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