MyCaffé is three, and it ended my one coffee a year habit

I used to drink about one coffee a year. It is the actual number. Usually somebody else’s idea, usually a special occasion, usually to make a special person happy.

Now I start the day with a cappuccino at MyCaffé. Most days. That is what a good café three minutes from your morning will do to a person, and MyCaffé is three years old on Tuesday.

They are marking it the way you would hope. All day, nothing to book, no code, nothing to show anybody:

• 15% off coffees, hot and cold drinks, croissants, viennoiseries, biscuits and pastries
• 10% off your lunch bill at lunchtime, eating in or taking it away
• Tuesday 25 August, 06:30 to 18:00, 6 Rue de la Fonte

You walk in and it is cheaper.

Two things you should know before the rest of this. I think it is the best cappuccino in Belval. And Michele has become a friend. Weigh those against each other however you like. Nobody pays to be on this site and nobody can, but it would be daft to write this and pose as a neutral party, when I am the man who went from one coffee a year to one before nine.

The cappuccino is genuinely very good. It is not, though, what changed the habit. It is the welcome. There is a particular kind of morning where you are running late and slightly grim about it, and somebody screams your name before you have got the door shut, and the cup is already going under the machine. That is not on any menu. The team have gone from staff to something closer to family.

In their third anniversary announcement, they wrote about the people who come back, some of them twice in the same day, and about knowing your name and your order before either gets said. Vous n’êtes plus vraiment des clients, vous êtes des amis. You are not really customers any more, you are friends.

I can confirm.

Three years is about how long that takes to build, and it is not nothing here. Belval empties out for most of August and goes quiet again at Christmas, and a café on this campus either shuts for a fortnight or sits through it while half its regulars are somewhere warmer. Three years of that is a lot of mornings. They open at half six, so somebody has been getting up in the dark for most of them.

It falls in a lovely week for it, too. Dalmat is back today after a fortnight shut, and MyCaffé was one of the places covering while it was away, so a few of Tuesday’s queue will be people who only found the door two weeks ago. Belval gets its mornings back today and a birthday tomorrow.

So: Tuesday. Go early if you want the quiet one, go at noon for the lunch, and say happy birthday while you are there. It costs nothing and it is the whole point.

Happy third, MyCaffé. Buon compleanno, e cent’anni.

That last one is how an Italian says it properly. A hundred years. Three down, ninety-seven to go.