Coloane Village is one of the very few places in Macau that remains relatively untouched by the drastic changes of the city’s economy, with corrugated iron houses built decades ago still standing quietly on the narrow streets overlooking the river. And it was this serene location that captivated Mandy Lou and her business partner, and inspired them to open Hann Café together.
She established Hann Café in one of the small tin houses just opposite the village branch of BCM bank. Mandy basically runs the shop by herself and usually doesn’t open on Wednesdays and Thursdays because of other work commitments. Due to licensing constraints, Hann Café only offers take-away coffee.
Her choice of location for the shop really happened by accident when one day she randomly decided to get on the number 25 bus and see where it took her.
“I had seldom been to Coloane and when I got off in the village I realized what a beautiful place it was, but there was nowhere to buy a good cup of coffee.”
It was then that she spotted a small, shabby tin house that she has now transformed into the very quaint and unique Hann Café.
Surprisingly, Mandy hasn’t always been a coffee lover.
“Actually I really didn’t like coffee in the past. But later I had a boyfriend in Britain who liked to drink coffee. So I tried drinking it and later found a part-time job in a coffee shop there and learned how to make coffee,” she says.
Today she has become an expert and believes that coffee is just as complicated as wine.
“Similar to grapes, coffee beans can be affected by the climate, the soil and the sunlight. There are also different shapes and sizes, as well as various degree of roasting. As a result, each cup of coffee can taste different.”
Mandy offers her customers a variety of coffee beans to choose from, arranged in jars on the counter for them to see. But she has noticed that many of her local customers don’t really know a lot about coffee.
“Some might say that they like a certain flavour in the coffee, but they don’t know much about it,” she says.
After running Hann Café for two years, Mandy says her current mission is to find an exclusive coffee bean from overseas. Last year, she travelled to Taiwan and Thailand to try to find beans that she liked, but was not satisfied with what she found. She hopes to travel further afield soon to find a truly unique type of coffee bean to offer her customers in the near future.
