Hidden Carlton café blends automation with the art of coffee

Tucked away in a tiny lane behind the busy corner of Lygon and Elgin streets is a surprising new hospitality venture – a specialty coffee shop with fully automatic machines alongside traditional ones and the aim of providing a relaxing escape.

When she first came to Australia Alicia Feng didn’t even drink coffee.

But as a fresh arrival she found the drink was a way of connecting with people.

“So, I started to adapt into this culture and start to explore,” she says.

Around a decade on, after training at pioneering specialty roasters ST. ALi, she is a highly regarded figure in the industry who is now at the forefront of “a very new exploration” for it.

Her third café, Atelier Enso, located in Raffa Place, Carlton and opened in July, is seemingly the first in Australia to incorporate fully automatic machines in a serious coffee context.

While people are generally very sceptical and assume she is “cutting corners”, Alicia argues her approach is not about cutting jobs but changing them.

“Baristas used to be knocking out the shots, doing the shots, with a lot of repetition,” she says. “But now their role is a little bit more like a coffee sommelier.”

Staff are thus freed up to have more interaction with customers, who are these days more curious about the products.

Alicia thinks it is a matter of time before most cafés choose to go largely automatic, with the handmade element enduring but focused on finer detail.

It has been “fun” to put traditional and automatic machines together for this business, she says – a move that reflects its philosophy.

The name Atelier Enso refers to a work-in-progress – and also Buddhist – attitude.

“So, we are not perfect, it’s imperfect, but it’s perfectly imperfect.”

“The brand is [also] focused on simplicity, slowing down, and just enjoying the moment in the present.”

Classical music plays in the white-painted warehouse space, which has been fitted out with timber ceilings, wood veneer shelving and counters and a large Japanese-style boxed paper light fitting.

It is spacious and bright with bouquets of dried flowers and coffee- and design-themed magazines on display.

Adjoining areas house the business’ glassed-in roaster and a large kitchen, which Alicia plans to make available to chefs for pop-up events or seasons.

In between interacting with customers a couple of staff tinker with a range of shiny gadgets in what looks like a big, spread-out kitchen.

Cards laid out along the bench describe the different types of coffee on offer.

You can have a house blend espresso from a fully automated Swiss-made Eversys machine, something commonly seen in service stations but put to work here with high expectations.
According to Alicia, it has an “amazing, beautiful extraction” process that “makes the coffee much sweeter and more consistent.

The cafe’s default coffee, made with house blend Jiku – a “comfortable daily cup” combining Ethiopian, Brazilian and Chinese beans – is produced by the Eversys – not that you would know.

It tastes pretty good.

Then you can order a single-origin or seasonal beverage made manually with “the most commonly seen machine in any coffee shop” – a La Marzocco Modbar with steamer.

For filter coffee, there is a “daily batch brew” machine and two fully automated, programmable ones.

When it comes to long blacks – known here as “flow blacks” – a complicated series of steps further filter and aerate espresso and dispense it via a Linkbar machine to deliver “a really sleek and creamy mouthfeel” from “your first sip”.

Also on offer are drinking chocolates, tea and house-made cakes, including Oolong tea roll and Basque burnt cheesecake.

Visiting around midday in the café’s second week of operation, there is an unrelaxing 5 to 10-minute wait to get in and be seated.

“We didn’t expect that!” Alicia laughs when she hears. “I didn’t do any promotion.

“And our staff are trained not to rush people, to let them enjoy their coffee.” •