Frank Kavanagh and Peter Sztal's Cloud Picker Café began life across the road from its current venue, in the Science Gallery at Trinity College where they delighted a loyal clientèle for nearly a decade.
The pair are best known as speciality coffee roasters and wholesalers (they sell their meticulously sourced seasonal single origin coffees to restaurants and caterers all over Ireland and beyond) and, when they moved out of the Science Gallery early in 2019 in order to create something of their own, they used the opportunity to focus on a unique food offering - and include Eastern European influences to reflect Peter's Polish food heritage.
On entering the long narrow space you are met with a coffee machine, a small selection of cakes and a very large counter of savoury salads and sandwiches. There is limited seating as most of the space is taken up with the counter displaying the delicious food, and it is mainly a takeaway operation. There is a kitchen unit visible at the back and a screen showing silent films, a nod to the fact that this used to be a projector room of the old Academy Cinema.
Opening at 8am Cloud Picker is a popular stop off for weekday breakfasts and offers mainly egg-based dishes on toasted challah with seasonal greens, wild mushrooms. Cloud Picker's own coffee bacon jam features, plus overnight soaked porridge with various home-made toppings (prune syrup, quince preserve, apricot jam, toasted seeds...).
The café’s signature stew is Peter's mother's beef goulash and there are unusual baked goods too, including light Polish yeast buns with fillings and toppings such as fresh blueberries, raspberries, walnuts or cane sugar and cardamom. The food is tasty and well priced, and with a wide selection of salads, three for €5 or five for €8, you can add on a protein or sauce. But the tag protein does not do justice to the juicy leg of honey baked ham or the perfectly boiled eggs, sliced open to reveal the vibrant yolk and sprinkled with a dusting of smoked paprika.
The new Cloud Picker Café was created to showcase Cloud Picker coffee, and all their seasonal coffees are available to drink in, take out or buy to use at home - including their best-known blend ‘Henry’, named for the company’s mascot, a friendly Great Dane.
As might be expected there are some unusual coffee offerings, such as a coffee kombucha, made with Cloud Pickers own coffee, to rose, orange blossom or lavender lattes (which are more subtle than they sound).
Sustainability is a top priority in all areas of the business with all of the packaging compostable, a selection of bins provided for different types of waste - and discount offered, not only for presenting keepcups, but also their own branded lunch boxes which act as a very practical sort of loyalty card.
