Berlin Bicyle Cafe Balances Passions
Kerri Krawec’s first restaurant gig was a nostalgic summer spent at her Grandma’s tea house, an addition on the old family home supplied by a one-acre garden. She also fondly remembers her Grandma’s impulse to show love with shared meals: “Nobody could ever leave her house empty-handed; Grandma would always send you away with food.”
Those early whiffs of inspiration led Krawec to spend 15 years learning various cooking styles while working in different kitchens in four provinces. She also did some WWOOFing in BC, immersing herself in farm-to-table living. And her roaming lifestyle also made way for many two-wheeled adventures, including a trek from New Brunswick to Ontario.
As Krawec was on another cycling excursion from Vancouver to Mexico in the fall of 2014, her cousin Graham Roe planted the seed in her mind that would become Berlin Bicycle Café. Roe had run a blog called Waterloo Bikes for years while working as a project manager in the tech sector. He was excited to see what Kitchener, Waterloo and the region had been doing to improve cycling infrastructure and commuter trails, especially the new Spur Line.
Their collaboration hinged on overlapping passions for local, wholesome food and making use of bikes more for transportation than recreation. As they learned through the process of creating their business, what makes a good bike shop doesn’t necessarily make a good coffee shop, and vice versa. But ultimately, their proximity to the Iron Horse Trail and the wide, well-used sidewalks of Belmont Avenue led to an ideal gap in the urban landscape for a hyper-local, mind-opening mash-up like this one.
Why did you make the Berlin Bicycle Café?
GRAHAM: We wanted to shake up the conventional bike shop experience. It’s really an extension of my passion for cycling advocacy by helping facilitate transportation change in our community by making a biking lifestyle more accessible.
KERRI: Technically it was an invitation from Graham to partner in this venture that brought me to Kitchener. But moving here to open a bicycle cafe seemed like the right choice because it was like the culmination of my personal history. I’m drawing on past work experience in restaurants, learning from interning on organic farms, my family ties to my Grandma’s farm, and my love of bikes. All of these experiences have kind of prepared me for this challenge.
There are very practical reasons for combining bikes, food and coffee, the most obvious being the seasonal nature of bike shops, and the need for a more predictable revenue stream. But there’s also the idealistic side of what these things represent. Cycling provides a means of transportation, but I always associate it with freedom. Even from a young age, I would go on little adventures on my bike and explore new roads. Now that I’m older, my adventures take me further. Just recently I biked down the West Coast, from Canada to Mexico. With food, I’ve learned that it matters where it comes from and how it’s produced. We’re focused on sourcing as much locally as possible and taking advantage of the abundance of this area.
Tell us about one of your favourite tools.
GRAHAM: One of my favourites is the tool chest that we use in our cafe kitchen to house our all our utensils. It melds the two cultures of our endeavour – bikes and coffee.
KERRI: My favourite tool is a set of measuring cups that I got from my Grandma. I use them all the time when I’m baking. The ironic thing is she rarely used them. She had made things so many times that she just knew how much of everything she needed. It was ‘a pinch of this,’ or, ‘a couple of scoops of that.’ Maybe one day I’ll get to that point, but for now I use her measuring cups.
Who (or what) made you into a maker?
KERRI: Definitely my Grandma was my first influence as a maker, and she also really led me to appreciate food and where it comes from. She had a farm in Norfolk County, and after she retired from farming, she built a tea room as an addition on her farmhouse and she served home cooked meals and catered church socials. My very first job in food service was working there with her for a summer. I might have been 12 at the time. Visits with her always involved work and food. We would freeze corn, jar pickles and make perogies by the hundred. Even in her 80s, she would take my siblings and me to a blueberry patch, set up a lawn chair in front of a blueberry bush, and manage to out-pick all of us. She taught me to appreciate the abundance of food that grows in this area, and how to make the most of it.
GRAHAM: I grew up on a bike, and having grown up in Holland, I’ve been fortunate to experience first-hand how a bicycle can be an integral part of the transportation system. As our community continues investing in cycling infrastructure, there’s a need to present a lifecycle view of cycling. In North America we have a real emphasis on the sport and recreational aspects of cycling. I think we need to swing the pendulum a bit and include essential transportation as part of the story of cycling. I hope our bicycle cafe can help start those conversations.
What was the last thing you made?
GRAHAM: Some of my kids’ previous bikes almost weighed the same that they did, and so we’ve been looking for kids bikes that are designed for their size, weight and geometry, so they can have the same kind of experience as adults get to have when riding.
One of the first bikes we sold out of our shop, just while we were in the product testing phase, was a cargo bike – or bakfiets, as the Dutch call them. This model challenges what you can do with a bike. It can carry 200 pounds, so easily two kids and a load of groceries.
KERRI: I just roasted some beets for a salad for tomorrow. I got the beets at the Kitchener Market. I go there every Saturday to stock up on produce for the week. I wish it was open more than just once a week, there’s so much great food available there. Other than bread and bagels, we make everything we serve at the cafe, so it means bringing in a lot of fresh food and doing a lot of prep.
What are some of your essential resources or collaborators in Kitchener?
KERRI: I’d say the essential resources are the other local businesses and producers that we rely on, such as the bread we source from Elora Bread Co., or the guernsey milk from Eby Manor Dairy in St. Jacobs. Those kinds of businesses show how we’re a beneficiary of other people making great products, which we source and create something from in turn.
One example of collaboration was with a friend who works for a company located at Communitech, who arranged for me to do some recipe testing prior to opening the cafe. I brought in an assortment of baked goods once a week and they basically reviewed them and gave me feedback, so a bunch of our recipes were put through that process. It gave me the chance to improve some of the recipes, get rid of some of the others, and it challenged me to find recipes to meet their preferences. I got to ask whether they preferred sweet or savoury, the importance of healthy choices, how to bake to accommodate allergies, that sort of thing.
GRAHAM: One of the nice things about running a business in a smaller city is that your customers are often your friends. We had a friend tell us we needed another refrigeration unit, for example. He wasn’t benefiting from sharing that advice; it was just part of that pay-it-forward mentality that makes it great to be doing something like this here. And it’s been so encouraging to have people from the neighbourhood just stopping in, offering their advice and even helping us swing hammers, lay tile and paint walls! There’s a really strong sense of community here in Waterloo Region.
The Waterloo Region Small Business Centre really helped us out with business planning too. Rob Clement set us up with one of their tools, which takes demographic data from Stats Canada and overlays the data on a map. This helped us to compare potential locations, plus we also looked at similar kinds of bike shops in other cities, so that we could map out where we wanted to end up. Belmont Village was one of those ideal locations and it seems to work perfect for our coffee and bike shop.