The cafe business isn’t easy. Trends come and go, and customers spend their weekends trying the latest and greatest openings, quickly moving onto the next without a thought of returning to the last. But there are many venues that are going the distance thanks to big-picture thinking and a multi-faceted approach to food, drink, and experience.
Hospitality speaks to Michael Ico from Sydney’s Splash, Soulmate, and Superfreak about creating cafés that roll design, quality food and beverage, and that coveted it-factor into one slick offering.
Hospitality: What do you look for when securing a café location?
Michael: Generally, we love to be in residential locations but still close to commercial areas. Most of our cafés have been in residential areas. We’ve always preferred to be off a main road so there is less noise and we don’t see street frontage as a big thing for us. When it came to Superfreak, my business partner Dan’s partner teaches at Scout Pilates next door, and they have the whole building. It all happened very fast.
H: How would you describe the culinary direction of Superfreak?
M: We wanted to be more health-driven, but it’s turned into café food as we know it that’s nourishing. We didn’t want to alienate anyone and for people to think we were just health food, so we moulded it to be in-between. We also don’t have a full kitchen, so we had to work within our constraints.
H: How did you come to work with Aplenty’s Michaela Johansson?
M: When we were talking about getting a chef to consult and write the menu, we wanted someone to create dishes that could be recreated by baristas, for example. Michaela resonated the most with us because we got along so well, and she could also see the vision we wanted. There were only two changes to the menu we currently have. She has a lot of great ideas.
H: Which dishes have been the most popular so far?
M: The porridge. We wanted to put a porridge on that was healthy but not covered up with fruit, so we used quality grains and buckwheat. But when we got to the tasting, Michaela had made it into a bit of a mash…like an old-school porridge with brown sugar and a clump of butter. It was the best porridge I’d ever eaten. The rotating salads we have on sell out fast throughout the day and the morning plate also sells
quite well.
H: What are some of the standout beverages?
M: Coffee sells the most. We do an adaptogen hot chocolate which has medicinal mushrooms in it, and we also have a smoothie with blue spirulina which does well. We didn’t want to have too many beverages on the menu, and we ended up with a tonne.
H: Superfreak has a unique, distinct fit out — talk us through the ideation of the space.
M: I am very much into architecture and design. Before I started working in hospitality, I was accepted to study architecture, but then I decided not to do it, so this has been super exciting for me. We have always done café fit outs ourselves, but when we got this space, we decided to get YSG on board. We told them about our concept and that we wanted a record player in there, and showed them the food and a little bit of the branding.
The inspiration wasn’t from us whatsoever, YSG came up with it. I know the idea for them was that they wanted it to feel homely. We have a mashup of ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s furniture in there and cork floors. It’s a little bit nostalgic and there are so many weird little pieces; we have a crazy lamp from New York, and vases sourced from different places around Sydney.
H: All your cafés have been incredibly well-received — what do you attribute your success to?
M: I’ve only recently realised that I love hospitality, and this is my career. For so long, I’ve been in the motion of, ‘I’ll open a shop and we’ll just do this without much thought’. But now we try and nail every aspect of a venue from the get-go.
Before we opened Superfreak, we did things we wouldn’t have done when we were younger. We had all our staff handbooks ready to go and now we know exactly what needs to be done. We’re really good at hiring people and we always talk about our core values, which revolve around being hospitable — that’s why we’re in the hospitality industry.
Being hospitable means being welcoming and making people feel special when they come in. It’s about making sure we say ‘G’day’ to people when they walk in the door and not acting like we’re too cool, so that’s a big part of it. I think that is our main focus above everything else. We focus on that more than we do food and coffee.
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