Right before we got the keys to our restaurant we were guest chefs in Bangkok, so we took the chance to visit as many traditional breakfast places as we could. The atmosphere of those places is the key inspiration for us and the essence of feeding the working people in the neighborhood is what we do now.

We met through skateboarding in Vienna and had both been skating for more than twenty years. But we never really liked being labelled as skaters, and we certainly don’t see Fokus as a “skate café”. Still, skateboarding is part of our history and identity.

Running a restaurant comes with many different challenges and competing priorities, but we are hosts before we are cooks or businesspeople. A good and successful restaurant has to live by that. The food can be excellent, but people also need to feel genuinely welcome and cared for.

It’s very inspiring to be surrounded by amazing and beautiful print publications from around the world every day. And the work never stops. New books and magazines are published all the time, the big challenge is to curate them really carefully.

We wanted to build a place where plants, design, books, and a great café existed together, not just as a concept but as a genuine daily experience. We never thought of it as strictly a plant store. We wanted to build our own world.

Nothing here follows a master plan. The interior, the walls, the posters, and the more than 4,000 books used as decoration all grew organically over two decades. We call it ‘curated disorder’, and it is the deliberate opposite of a polished, over-designed café.

Success is not a state, it’s an episode. After every high, the move isn’t to expand, it’s to get stronger. We learned that the hard way after record sales, rapid growth, and nearly losing everything. That lesson shapes every decision we make today.

Cafe Exchange is uniquely located in a world heritage architectural site. We intentionally avoided the clichés of formal, institutional dining to meet the broad range of people inhabiting the space and facilitate moments of exchange between them. We wanted the café to feel open, human, and alive.

Four years ago, my wife and I decided to connect these rooms and turn them into a little neighborhood coffee shop. Our area was very much underserved in terms of coffee shops and could really benefit from a nice, cozy space open to everyone.