Canberra’s original Instagrammable café has a new look and menu

Posted on 3 September, 2024

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that when it comes to cafés that blazed the path for Canberra’s 2010s foodie renaissance, The Cupping Room is at the top of the list.

In fact, as an ANU student in the early 2010s, The Cupping Room was the first ‘cool café’ I had ever been to. With its signature duck-egg green cups, a serious approach to coffee and social media-friendly brunchy-lunchy dishes, The Cupping Room was ONA’s gift to Canberra foodies – a place for the best long black (sorry, black coffee) of your life, and the best hotcakes.

Now, 11 years after opening, The Cupping Room has a fresh look and equally fresh menu that aim to blend the café’s heritage with its hopes for the future.

Located between ANU, the Law Courts and the Civic Police Station, The Cupping Room has never wanted for customers. On weekdays, suits stream through the doors – KeepCups in hand – while on weekends, families and uni students lounge over pastries and avocado toast.

But according to Rachel Amper, General Manager of The Cupping Room, the café’s popularity has also provided a challenge for staff. As the years went on, the team realised that interactions with customers were becoming increasingly ‘transactional’ as busy city workers sought a fast takeaway coffee or a speedy business lunch.

So Rachel, who moved from Sydney with her barista partner specifically to work for ONA after falling in love with their Marrickville café, was tasked with rebranding the cafe’s atmosphere from ‘corporate’ to ‘community’. Did we mention it was 2020?

“We got really lucky because we were open during a lot of the lockdown and had a lot of frontline workers and ANU students coming to us – for some of those people we were the only people they were going to interact with that day.”

Building a team of ‘people person’ staff and putting special focus on recognising regulars – such as buying a Polaroid camera solely to take photos of regulars for their photo wall – Rachel says that, slowly, The Cupping Room became a place where people could belong, with their recent renovations another piece of this puzzle.

“We wanted to create a community feel to the space and also embrace a less-is-more approach,” explains Rachel. The result is a streamlined interior that doesn’t sacrifice The Cupping Room’s signature blonde wood aesthetic.

The bench seating once used to host cupping sessions has been replaced by small tables, while a large family-style dining table now sits near the kitchen pass, allowing room for larger groups. Outside, awnings create winter-friendly seating options with a bench for those waiting for a table. The community-first approach was even part of the renovations with Rachel and the team giving old furniture away to the community through Buy Nothing pages and sourcing their new solid wood table from Facebook Marketplace in Sydney. They didn’t close the café either, choosing to welcome regulars with a smaller indoor footprint while work was done at night.

Meanwhile, Chef Owen [Surname] has designed a new menu to complement the fresh look while paying homage to the café’s past. Using The Cupping Room’s 2016 cookbook, Owen has designed a menu of classic dishes with a twist, like the French Toast with cinnamon-soaked brioche, butterscotch, mandarin, strawberry, yuzu mascarpone, butter crumble and chocolate almond shards and the Avocado served with whipped goats’ cheese, pomegranate vinaigrette, pickled beetroot, salsa verde, hazelnut dukkah and a poached egg on sourdough.

The result is a greatest-hits-style menu with something for every taste and occasion. Did we mention the menu features their signature caramel milkshake?

As for his favourite dish? The Mushroom Toast.

“Owen is incredible and he put so much effort into [that dish] because he created a mushroom foam and I’ve never seen it on a café menu before.”

The Mushroom Toast.

While the ONA-trained team are as passionate as ever about coffee, Rachel explains that they’ve also taken things back to basics when it comes to their coffee menu.

“It was kind of scary for some people,” laughs Rachel, referring to The Cupping Room’s original coffee format of milk or black coffee. “We never want people to feel like they’re not welcome here. We’re about the people and we want them to love their coffee.”

The final touch on the new look, Rachel explains, will be populating the café’s walls with local art, something Rachel says has always been part of The Cupping Room’s DNA.

“We want to become a third space where people can come and create,” says Rachel. “A place that won’t kick you out after you finish your coffee.”

As for whether Rachel and the ONA team have gotten their wish of a café with community at its core, Rachel smiles as she remembers meeting one regular for the first time.

“One of my favourite regulars comes in every day and not only does he chat with us, we teach him how to make latte art,” she says. “When we started, our only interaction was his coffee order and I was like ‘I’m going to make that man my friend’.”

Photography: Supplied.