Most people see a café as a calm place. Coffee, cake, familiar faces, a bit of routine.
What they don’t see is how quickly everything can change behind the scenes.

In the space of a few weeks, two of my baristas have left. That doesn’t sound huge until you add the rest of the sentence , I only have three. None of them are full time. Two work one day a week, and the other was almost full time, depending on her schedule elsewhere.

Which means that when two people leave, what’s actually left is one person covering one shift across the entire week.

That’s the bit people don’t see. The maths of it.

If I’m on the coffee machine, I’m not cooking. I’m not baking. I’m not doing the thing that actually keeps the café running. So I start plugging holes. Moving myself around. Filling gaps where I can, even when it doesn’t really make sense, because there isn’t another option.

Add to that the person who helps me bake three days a week needing to cut her hours in half after developing concussion again, completely out of anyone’s control, and suddenly the plan I had in my head just doesn’t exist anymore.

Today really summed it up. In a meeting, the food situation came up. A customer had been chewing the ear off the manager next door about how much she loved our Ultimate Bap menu. Why don’t we have it on right now? What a shame.

And she’s not wrong. It is a shame.

But what that moment highlighted is something much harder to explain, I simply don’t have the capacity to make it happen right now. Not because I don’t care. Not because I don’t want to. But because there are only so many hands, and mine can only be in one place at a time.

I think there’s a quiet kind of grief in that. Grief for the version of the café I want to be running right now. The food I’d love to be making. The ideas that have to stay on pause, not because they aren’t good enough, but because there isn’t space to hold them.

From the outside, it probably looks like a choice. Behind the scenes, it’s triage.

Running a small café means there’s no buffer. No spare person. No invisible safety net. When something shifts, everything shifts. You get very good at rewriting the week, reworking rotas, adjusting expectations, and holding things together quietly while trying to make the space feel warm and steady for the people who walk through the door.

And I think this is the reality no one really talks about. Cafés aren’t just about coffee and cake. They’re about people, their lives, their health, their limits, all intersecting in one small, fragile ecosystem.

Weeks like this remind me that what’s really required isn’t better planning or tighter systems. It’s kindness. Kindness towards the people who work with you, kindness towards customers who don’t see what’s happening behind the scenes, and kindness towards yourself when you’re stretched thinner than you’d like to admit.

This is the reality of running a café. The plan changes. Sometimes more than once. And all you can do is adapt, keep going, and be as kind as you can along the way.

For now I'm doing what I can with what I have... and trusting that the rest will come back when it's ready.

X

For now, I’m doing what I can with what I have — and trusting that the rest will come back when it’s ready. now, I’m doing what I can with what I have — and trusting that the rest will come back when it’s ready.For now, I’m doing what I can with what I have — and trusting that the rest will come back when it’s ready.For now, I’m doing what I can with what I have — and trusting that the rest will come back when it’s ready.