Imagine a place where you are charged for the time you are there and not for the coffee you drink. This is an anti-coffee, a trend that started in Russia, conquered Europe and is coming to Brazil.
Anti-coffee is a space that serves coffee but does not charge you for it. You pay for the time you stay. It’s a mix of coffee shop with coworking, made for the customer to feel at ease. And spend even more time there! In these places you usually find coffee and company for a good chat, snacks, board games, tables to work, internet, movies and video games.
This concept is different than Nescafe coffee shop, where each one prepares his own coffee (we talk about it here). Here coffee is served, you are only charged differently.
Also called “pay-per-minute” coffee or time club, the first anti-coffee was opened in Russia in 2011 by writer Ivan Mitin.
Like all good innovations, this was also born out of necessity. Ivan was waiting for space for an artistic project and, tired of spending money on coffee shops, he and his friends rented an attic where they came to gather. All the payment was voluntary, but over time he improved the system that started to charge for the time of permanence.
The success was so great that the idea spread and the copies soon popped up all over the country until it arrived in Europe. Ivan opened 9 franchises in the city and more than 200 other establishments opened anti-cafes.
And the other continents?
The concept arrived in Brazil in 2016 and has some adaptations, of course. The Lemni Café is in São Paulo and the Guajá in Belo Horizonte. In these spaces it is possible to take your own food, cook, clean, rent for events and attend workshops, courses and lectures.
Anti-coffee in Brazil – with cheese bread, of course!
In India there is The Minute Bistro in Bengaluru, where the customer makes his own coffee. In Canada, Anticafe Montreal even offers handicraft classes.
The Minute Bistro
The anti-coffee movement is not alone
In Brazil, at the anti-bar Bier Keller only guests of their owners or their friends come in, there is no waiter, each one drinks whatever he or she wants to drink. There are more than 250 beer labels to choose from. To pay the bill, one just need to count the plates and empty bottles of the table and pay accordingly.
Anti-bar
In some European cities, there are “anti-museum” or “non-museum” movements, where people make tour itineraries for points that do not include museums. In São Paulo there is also the anti-mall, an open space with 46 stores in recycled containers and “green roofs”, in addition to 20 operations of food trucks. The anti-mall, unlike the anti-coffee, has the same business model of the mall, except that the stores are in containers, I see no big difference.
Anti-shopping at Butantã neighbourhood, in São Paulo/Brazil
What other “anti-” will we have?
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