Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/66983
NILS VIK F or most residents of Winnipeg, coffee means a "double- double"—two creams, two sugars—at Tim Hortons, a Canadian mainstay since the 1970s. For those who aren't devotees of the franchise more colloquially known as "Timmy's," Starbucks is a distant second. Winnipeg is not a coffee town. (I grew up there, so I feel like I'm allowed to say it.) But then again, if you look beyond the drive- thrus, plastic stir sticks and venti caramel macchiatos, it is. The same coffee-drinking teachers and construction workers you'd find in any other city live here as well—they're just a little colder, shivering in their cars for six months of the year in sub-zero tem- peratures. Winnipeggers are people who just want something to warm them up. Into that landscape, void of Stumptowns and Intelligentsias (and, on the culinary side, even Whole Foods and Trader Joe's) comes Parlour Coffee, a 420-square-foot portal into a world where coffee matters. Nils Vik, Parlour's 29-year-old founder and chief visionary, thinks part of the reason the prairie city of 650,000 tends to be a bit of a epicurean late-bloomer is that the majority of its busi- 64 COFFEE ALMANAC 2012 ness owners are Baby Boomers. Vik says there aren't many new service industry businesses opening in the city, and the ones he can think of were started by people under the age of 35. Why? He credits social media. "Your realm of understanding opens up so much when you're into that type of media," he says. "I've had people tell me that Parlour reminds them of Fernandez & Wells in London—and they've never even been there, but they've seen it online." Twitter and the café's Tumblr blog are mediums Vik and his fellow Gen X co-workers are using to their advantage. During my December visit, the shop celebrated its 1,000th customer by tweeting an invitation to its followers to stop in for a complimen- tary espresso. Within minutes it was standing-room-only in the stark, modern space. Many of us come to love good coffee gradually, through a blend of experimentation and education. But Vik was won over in an instant. An architect by trade, his defining moment came on a graduate school trip to Montreal in 2008. "I didn't drink coffee at all before then," he says. "We were meeting at a little place called Café Olympico in the Mile End, and my professor forced me to