Café FLOS coffee & bagels: New York in Hall

FLOS coffee & bagels brings a fresh vibe and New York charm to Hall in Tirol, with its generous selection of coffees and a variety of bagels. I paid a visit to this new addition to the old town and asked Nora and Michael from the team about the café. New York in Hall!

The founders of Café FLOS are Stefan, Paul and Flo, all of whom have a background in the catering industry. Stefan runs the Animahl bistro at the Innsbruck Alpine Zoo and is therefore responsible for the catering side of the café. Paul is a co-founder of the company Paul & Ernst, which produces food bikes used to sell food, ice cream, drinks and much more. Paul is originally a designer and is therefore responsible for the café’s entire interior design. Flo is the founder of the Unbound roastery in Wattens. FLOS coffee & bagels effectively serves as the Unbound roastery’s own café.

Consequently, only Unbound coffee is sold in the café. To round off the offering, there is, of course, something to eat as well. As well as delicious regional cakes from Mils and Innsbruck, there’s the versatile bagel. The bagel can be prepared perfectly well as a sweet treat or as a savoury dish.

Above all, it was important to the founders to find a food that complemented the coffee well. The ‘coffee & bagels’ concept is already very widespread in New York. To bring a little bit of New York to Hall, they settled on the bagel. Whether for breakfast or lunch, sweet or savoury, bagels always go well with coffee and therefore fit perfectly into the concept of FLOS coffee & bagels. The fact that bagels are not yet very well known in this country was just another plus point in the search for something out of the ordinary.

As a team, we place great importance on regional produce and sustainability, which, of course, go hand in hand. Short supply chains and regional suppliers are an essential part of this, although it is an ongoing process. As already mentioned, the cakes come from Mils and Innsbruck, and ingredients such as yoghurt, eggs and milk are also supplied from Mils. We source our fish from the fish farm in Rinn, some of the fruit and vegetables come directly from Hall, and the flowers in the café are supplied by the florist next door. Of course, there’s always room for improvement and we’re far from finished – for example, we don’t yet source our meat from the region, and even the bagels themselves currently still come from Hamburg. But we’re constantly striving to improve our offering and source as much as possible from the region.

Exactly. That’s because making bagels is quite a faff. The hole in the bagel comes about because the bagel has to be boiled before it is baked. It has this hole so that you can fish the bagel out of the water. Doing this on a large scale, so that the bagels always look roughly the same even when produced in large quantities, is difficult. We couldn’t find anyone in the local area who could supply them, which is why we source them from the large bakery in Hamburg. It simply comes down to this: if you decide to sell bagels, quality is key, and you just have to find out where to get them from.

Word has already spread in the local area about the quality of the coffee from Unbound Roasters, whilst we’ve received mixed feedback on our range of bagels. Some guests are already familiar with bagels and are delighted that they’re now available in their neighbourhood. Others, however, aren’t familiar with bagels and are a bit puzzled at first. We’re always happy to explain that a bagel is much like a bread roll with a hole in the middle. Most people get the idea, and once they’ve tried our bagels, they’re won over.

Guests also enjoy coming back to us because they really like the café’s ambience and the atmosphere within the team. We get on so well as a team – it’s like working alongside your best friends. That’s how we create such a relaxed atmosphere, even though you can’t exactly serve that up on a plate. It’s still a big part of what the café’s all about, and it’s something special that sets us apart.

Something we’re really looking forward to is the addition of an outdoor seating area. From spring onwards, you’ll be able to enjoy your coffee and bagels in the fresh air right opposite our café on the Marktanger square. At the moment, you can order all our food and drinks to take away, but a delivery service would also be something we’d like to offer in the future. However, that’s all still a long way off, and as a café we’ll need to be established a bit longer first – after all, we’ve only been open since last October.