Cafes / Reviews
Dom’s Coffee House – cafe review
The fashion in Bristol at the moment for new food and drink openings is small. Small like the half a dozen businesses soon to open in converted shipping containers at Cargo in Wapping Wharf, Alex Does Coffee on Old Market Street or Pickle at Underfall Yard.
So Dom’s Coffee House on St Augustine’s Parade on the centre spectacularly and bravely bucks the trend.
Spread across three floors, it is absolutely vast. The first floor room with its fireplaces and chandeliers spreads across Dom’s below, Pizza Hut next door and a neighbouring archway, offering panoramic views across the centre.
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They will have a herculean task even half-filling this space, with currently the only food options sandwiches and paninis, as well as traybakes from Cakesmiths and pastries from Bordeaux Quay.
Coffee is taken seriously though, with a shiny new La Marzocco machine with built-in scales – thought to be the first in Bristol.
On barista duties on Tuesday morning was Arrow from Just Ground only a few hundred yards away, learning more about the craft of coffee while working towards a new professional qualification and making an exemplary flat white with a single origin from Extract.
You’ve got to imagine the future when walking in here after negotiating the current building works right outside their front door. Once the centre is fully finished, this will be in the midst of a promised European-style piazza instead of in the middle of a building site like today.
This is the first food and drink business for sound engineer Louis Sherman, who carried out most of the refurbishment work himself.
The cafe occupies what used to most recently be a recruitment business within the grade II listed Dominion House – built in 1899 for Star Life Assurance and originally designed to be even grander than it is today.
Louis calls the ground floor his “starter for 10”, hopefully enticing people to step inside.
Original features abound in this historic building that once upon a time used to overlook the River Frome. Steel columns and girders are next to exposed brickwork, with the addition of reclaimed wood hemming in the counter on the ground floor.
Dom’s Coffee House’s ambitions are clear – it now just needs to work out what to do with its huge space that surely can’t be filled with coffee, cakes and sandwiches alone.
Dom’s Coffee House, 23-25, St Augustine’s Parade, Bristol, BS1 4UL
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