The Laundromat Café

The laundromat café, as the name implies, is a café with self-service washing facility. It started out as a washing facility and then the café section's business is blooming so much that it has now become the major income of the 'café'. The seeding idea is to provide customer with good means of killing time while waiting for their laundry, plus food & drink. One stop location for stomach, chores and relaxing, very decent idea.

The café is crowned as the hippest laundromat in the world and boast the title of best brunch service from AOK (a Danish website on everything in Copenhagen from food to fashion and events) in 2007. There are two laundromat café in Copenhagen, Denmark and one of them is just around the corner from where I stayed. Sadly, after living at current address for more than a year, walking past it daily on my way to work, seeing the crowd flocking the café throughout seasons, I have never set foot on the café until recently.

One fine Sunday afternoon in summer, Mr.T and I visited the café, just to see what the fuss is all about. The outdoor seats are totally occupied, so we have to sit inside, which is not bad at all. Soft music playing in the background, a couple of table of guests minding their own stuff, reading one of the thousand books available, chatting and surfing internet.

Menu is placed near to the cashier, orders are to be placed by the counter and will be brought to your table, bills to be settled prior to leaving (or if you prefer, you can always pay up front). The café serves brunch until 4pm, and it's quite a good deal. One day I'd have to wake up late, go for a 3pm brunch and skip dinner ;) If you want something sweet to sink your tooth in the afternoon, there's no lack of option here too.

I love the environment there. There's nothing grand about it but the simple use of bright colour, books that are arranged in colour order and the random pictures/posters of the wall just make this place so comfortable, it's almost like sitting in my own living room (except with strangers). While waiting for food to be delivered, one look behind the counter and I found some games available: yatzi, card games, and even chest set. Never tried yatzi before and it was fun, even with just 2 people.

I wanted to try one of their more creative 'healthy' drinks so I went for the mango, elderflower and mint juice; and I like it. Mr.T ordered the elderflower in bottle but being a healthy café, their elderflower drink is not sweetened, and trust me, you don't want your elderflower drinks unsweetened; it taste funny.

We had dinner planned out so can only go for a lighter food, hence a portion of nachos to share. Comes with sour cream, guacamole, salsa and meat sauce. The cheese topping is definitely on the stingy side, I've seen much better ones and the sauces are, frankly, below average. The guy next table ordered a grilled sandwich and he seems to be enjoying it very much, maybe next time I ought to try the award winning brunch or the sandwich instead.

 

During our dining, playing, chatting session at the café, a foreigner came for the washing. To be honest, I was actually surprised, I thought the laundromats are more 'for show' than for use; but he changed some small coins with the cashier and started washing. Then I was thinking, maybe this is a place that ought to be recommended to tourists who needed to wash their laundry and yet sink into a nice environment with some food & drink, won't it be nice?

This place screams cool and score well on environment but the food? hmm...I think I have to try out the brunch to know for sure; but I'll be back again.

New Food Blog

I've travelled to quite a number of places within the past months without any update to the posts: Tromsø, Monaco, Brussels, Lake Como... and I'm also struggling to maintain my blog's 'personality'. I'm trying not to make it looks like another food blog but my food enthusiasm and the increase amount of cooking I'm doing is really not helping, so I decided to create a new blog, solely focusing on food: kitchenblueprint.blogspot.com

Restaurant visits will remain on this post, together with my 'everyday' scribbles & travels; while all food related recipes (including cake) that I have experimented with, (be it a success or failure) will be published in the new food blog; partially also to ease my own archiving, don't want to live through the pain of searching for recipes from scratch again every time I wanted to cook something that I've tried before. Plus, the original recipe might not be a best fit case anyway and I don't want to miss out any more personal notes.

As for the older recipes that I have already published in this blog, hopefully, one day, I will manage to migrate all of them to the food blog, else, they'll just remain here to remind myself how I manage to lost control of maintaining a blog.

So then, here's an ambitious thinking to maintain 2 blogs from the lazy owner of one less than frequently updated blog. May god bless :)

Copenhagen Flooded

Being born and raised in a tropical country, thunder storm is no stranger to me but here's something new. In midst of a fine summer day, the Danish weather forecast predicted 20mm of rain but heavy thunder storm with more than 150mm downpour in less than half an hour happened instead and turned Copenhagen into a 'canal-city'.

I was out visiting a colleague's place outside of Copenhagen and it was impossible to walk across the street without getting totally wet. I hopped from regional train to S-train, and then to bus, all without getting myself too wet (with a struggling to survive umbrella) but the final stretch home is the real killer. 

Corners of the streets and road surfaces are over-flown with water because the drain system simply can't handle so much water at a time. It's not a pleasant feeling having to walk through pools of at least ankle depth water knowing that those are actually rain + drain water. And thanks to the wind, I'm half wet after a short 50m walk. 

Compare to some motorist /cyclist, I guess getting soaking wet is not such bad situation. Some insurances don't cover water damage so aside from the inconveniences caused, there's also the money matters in account. The rain then followed by hail, Tivoli and Palads had to shut down with fear of electrical disturbance. Lighting, thunder and heavy rain is a bad bad situation for an amusement part.

Networks were down, a lot of house hold lost land line telephony, highways are shut down, traffic is heavily affected. It's not like the movie 2012 kind of disaster but it's enough to cause a lot of trouble for Copenhageners. Well, on a lighter side, Danes has a very literal way of naming such down pour. They called it skybrud, translate to cloud breaks; I find it cute (the name of course, not the situation) :)