There was a lot of excitement late last year (2018) as the London branch of Omotesando Koffee opened just off Oxford Street. I watched as there were visits by Brian’s Coffee Spot, and Bex’s Double Skinny Macchiato and others, thinking that soon, I too would pop along. After all, it is a place that celebrates pour overs in central London. And yet, I went for the first time two weeks ago while meeting Sadiq of Amoret Coffee to discuss details of the first coffee and science evening being hosted in the Notting Hill branch of Amoret on the 11 June (more details and sign up page here).
On that first occasion, I had enjoyed a Rwandan by pourover and took in the minimalism and cubist geometry of the cafe but largely was too involved in discussing details of the event to think about the connections that the space prompted. And so a second visit was arranged. Again I found that the fold out chairs underneath the bench tables were a little too tall for me (though on the second occasion I didn’t fall off) but it did mean that, although I had a prime seat in front of the bar where they were preparing my pour over (a Burundi from guest roaster La Cabra), it was not easy to turn around to watch. It was however great to find that the cake menu at the order point at the front of the cafe clearly listed all the allergens in each of the cakes and so I was able to confidently enjoy a vegan banana cake with the coffee.
Omotesando offers a challenging space for a website built on the premise that any cafe offers an opportunity to explore connections to the wider world of physics if you just slow down, take in your surroundings and notice them. It is a space that seems to revel in minimalism. Most of the space is a fairly light coloured, mostly uniform wood. The bar is framed with a cube, a shape that seems to crop up all around Omotesando, even in some of the cakes. The fold out stools (circular) are made of the same colour of wood as the rest of the majority of the cafe (though there are a couple of exceptions to this which hint at the carpentry). Perhaps the idea is that we should focus on the coffee rather than the environment. And maybe that is where your mind enjoys wandering, but another thought suggested itself to my mind.
Sitting on the stool facing the window, wishing that I could turn around to watch the pour over being poured while remaining comfortable (there is a foot rest when facing forward), it struck me that sitting right in front of the bar did not help me when I wanted to use the glass of the window as a mirror to the inside of the cafe. The glass was perfectly transparent to my eye and reflected very little of the light behind me. The fact that the side of the (La Marzocco) espresso machine was transparent rather than metallic and revealed the pipework and wiring that enabled great espressos to be prepared (we also enjoyed an iced latte) briefly led me to consider why some materials are transparent and others not (and also how transparency varies as the frequency of light changes).
But as I reflected further, I could see in my mind’s eye, the viewpoint of a deep sea diver looking up from the sea bed towards the sky. A circle of light, “Snell’s Window” opening above them. You can see images of Snell’s window where divers are framed by the effect in the photograph here. The effect is caused by the refraction of the light as it enters the water. Just as a straw (paper of course) appears bent as you view it through the glass of water, so light entering the sea will be bent by an amount given by Snell’s law. Even light entering at a grazing incidence will be refracted towards the ‘normal’ (the line perpendicular to the sea-air interface) and so if you work through the maths (there’s a good description here), you find that you will only see light from a cone of about 100 degrees around your view point.
But although Otomesando has an entirely glass frontage, you do not feel you are in a gold fish bowl, nor can you only see a small window outside. The wide window instead offering plenty of opportunity for watching the office workers and builders scurry about outside. And, on writing this and looking through my photos of the cafe, I noticed that my photographs of the front of the cafe and of a coffee inside were both taken at shallow angles showing the reflections from the surface of the window and the coffee rather than the interior. An effect almost opposite to that of the deep sea diver. Omotesando Koffee offers a space where each cup offers further opportunities for reflection: more time for noticing the physics of the everyday. A great place therefore to spend some time thinking about, as well as enjoying, your coffee.
Omotesando is at 8 Newman Street, W1T 1PB