Surveyed
A one-man shop on Mount Zion, just behind the harbour front, in one of the earliest buildings on the St Ives wharf — roughly sixteenth-century, a fisherman's store in its first life, a Commando base in the 1940s, and from 1949 the workshop of the sculptors Faust and Wharton Lang, until the coffee arrived in 2014. Mike, who runs it alone and states plainly on his own site that he has no wish to grow a chain, works through bottomless portafilters one cup at a time: doses weighed in and out, extraction timed, the grinder purged between varieties, good guest roasters rotating through. The house line is 'we're not quick', and it is meant. People travel for it.