I consistently add small hospitality businesses to the map, because I admire people who decide to work in this crazily competitive, very unforgiving and demanding industry on their own. One can earn money in a billion of ways, and serving people food and beverages is not the most monetarily rewarding one. Usually there’s some other motive there – something like building a direct respectful connection with other people by providing them with what each of us needs every day – food, drinks, a place to sleep. No one understands essential human needs better than people who work in hospitality. No one is more accepting of them. I tremendously respect that.
Also, I believe that small cafes and bars are places that to a great extent define quality of life in a city. You can have a conversation there, or a work meeting in an environment more chilled than an office, or just a moment of quiet by yourself in the middle of a crazy day. At uni, I remember reading that coffee and pizza places in Greenwich Village, NY in 1960s in many ways contributed to the development of the area as a diverse and highly creative environment. It naturally connected people of different backgrounds and ethnicities, making their contact super easy and straightforward. My gut feeling is, this concept is very accurate whether it’s NY or not.
This place here (picture above) is a small coffee place in St Petersburg called «Zaymiomsya Kofe» («Let’s do coffee»). It belongs to Valya and Jenya, two students, boyfriend and girlfriend, who opened it 1.5 year ago. They found a spot that no one wanted – a darkish space 5 blocks away from the main road. The street wasn’t one bit lively. Valya and Jenya renovated the space themselves (they brought furniture from people who were giving it away on avito.ru), took a loan and bought a coffee machine. 3 months later the future chairmen of St Petersburg charity «The Warm House» (a charity that provides homeless people in winter with a place to sleep over) met exactly there – «Zaymiomsya Kofe» is very small, so they just ended up having a conversation because they were sitting next to each other. I know this story from Jenya who I talked to – this coffee place was not too far from a hotel where I stayed when I came to St Petersburg to work for one week in March 2019. I wrote a good part of my script (I am a screenwriter) sitting on a sofa in a corner from which this picture is taken. Even though the business is not at all a money-fountain, Valya &Jenya’s place has already made the area more special and friendly than it was.
This place (picture above) is a family restaurant in Niseko, Japan. The guy in the picture is Takeshi. Takeshi’s mother was one of the first people in Niseko who years ago employed 2 foreigners for a season – it was very unusual, as most of the Japanese people at the time considered work to be something that requires life-long commitment (not to mention that in general Japanese attitude to people of different culture was a bit cautious). These two guys were Australians who came to Niseko to snowboard and needed a job to support themselves during winter season. Later on, when the resort started to become extremely popular among foreigners, these two guys started the first international winter sports school in the area – one that later got called «Go Snow». Now it is the most successful school there: they employ more than 400 instructors each season – I learned jumping on snowboard with them in Feb 2019. But it was Takeshi’s mom, who at the time gave them jobs – making it possible for them to stay. The restaurant is still there – it’s called «Rin». Takeshi jokes that his mom contributed so much to the local economy that the government should have given her large pension. She says he talks too much instead of cooking and cleaning.
To me, this is how small places change the world.