Designer Mike Abrahams

Mike Abrahams of the London design consultancy Abrahams attended several BurgerMondays and SpagWednesdays and was struck by the easy links made amongst strangers thrown together at shared tables. (What people will do to get their hands on a drippy, two-fisted bacon cheese burger!) In creating a pop-up logo Mike sought to represent young&foodish as the sum of these new connections.

Choosing to work with the Frankfurter Highlight font mostly because he couldn’t resist the foodish name Mike printed paper placemats each containing a single character from Y-O-U-N-G-&-F-O-O-D-I-S-H.

Photographer Paul Winch-Furness

At six consecutive pop-ups, including the 10th of November debut of WichThursday, the food and restaurant photographer Paul Winch-Furness took playful portraits of diners holding up – or goofing with – their lettered placements. He also encouraged the diners to self-assemble for group shots spelling out words, gibberish or fragments of either.

Designer Myra Murtagh

Mike’s colleague Myra Murtagh turned these images into two versions of the animated pop-up logo seen at the top of this website since November. The collaboration of Mike, Paul, Myra and all the obviously proud models who posed with their lettered placemats will run for just a few more weeks.

All photos by  Paul Winch-Furness

The reasonably safe premise behind my CoffeeSaturday pop-up series was that there would be a correlation between the quality of the coffee and that of the conversation. Nothing new there: For centuries coffee shops have cultivated an open exchange of ideas, knowledge and opinions both meaningful and meaningless. I nevertheless chose to sweeten the equation with a third element: the cookie.

 For the first CoffeeSaturday pop-up at Prufrock in May I organised a speculoos bake-off and tasting. For the 3 September pop-up at the enchanting new location of the London coffee shop Tapped & Packed I invited my talented friends Thomas Bonasera and Ian James to join me in a biscotti bake-off.  Tapped & Packed managing director Richard Lilley made it a four-way competition: Richard’s cranberry almond honey biscotti vs Tom’s spelt almond biscotti vs Ian’s pistachio cranberry almond biscotti vs my chocolate hazelnut biscotti.

To complement the cookies T&P baristas Sang Ho Park and Rob Dunne brewed El Salvador San Rafael Bourbon beans from the outstanding UK roaster Has Bean for cups of filter coffee, espressos or flat whites. The San Rafael’s chocolate and hazelnut notes seemed a good match for nutty biscotti and a perfect one for my chocolate hazelnut variety.

Or maybe not. My #ChocHazel biscotti finished last in the bake-off. Ian’s #PistCranOrange biscotti won the competition and Tom’s #SpeltAlmond biscotti were a close second. From these results it seems clear that CoffeeSaturday voters drew one of two conclusions: Either harmonious flavours work better than matching ones when pairing coffee and cookies or Ian, Tom and Richard’s biscotti were just better the mine.