Warm and Glad

With my wife in 2012 I opened a store. What was meant to be a small espresso bar with a retail offering of deli food (imported tins and bottles and dry goods), books, magazines and vinyl records, became, quite quickly, a full-on day-time restaurant and co-working spot. The co-working spot never landed well with me. I had never wanted a room full of people on laptops, draining the free wifi and nursing one coffee over most of the day. We even had a few confrontations with people either bringing their own packed lunch or, worse, setting up a full desktop computer on one of our café tables - monitor, PC tower, keyboard and mouse! We tried to limit wifi time and even shoo people off tables, moving them to the bar counters when we actually had paying customers coming in for lunch. But it was all pretty stressful - the free wifi hack and the busyness combined. Saturday morning brunch service was especially hair-raising, which weekly saw a large crowd form inside our small space, pressurising the output of our single boiler coffee machine - making every flat white and every smashed avo or scrambled eggs on toast land up taking longer to prepare than most people would usually be willing to accept. For a few years it was properly tough work. We were learning lessons almost every single day. Lesson #1 - How to be antagonistic to your customers who just desperately want to come in and experience what their early adopter friends said was a cute place that had nice food and coffee and played cool music. It was like, yes we need your money, but no, we can't cope with serving you. We did have a great group of regulars who "got" the place, who read the room, who fit in with us. Some were people who used the place to work on weekdays, but spent money in an unspoken agreement of fairness. Others just dug the vibe, loved the food, enjoyed the team who worked there (who were all absolute gems of people) and didn't mind waiting 10 minutes for their coffee. We made friends - lifelong friends as well. We grew the retail side of it and expanded into a new connected space, then an adjacent store, and then an entirely new floor below our café. It's a long story for another time, but expanding into the other shops too early, growing too fast, changing what people liked most, inconsistency, the wrong location with no passing trade, three massive night-time break-ins that stripped our largest retail store to the bones each time, and one evening dinner service where patrons were robbed at gunpoint - all of it meant we had to close it all down. Down and out. Had to let go of the team. Lost money. Lost face. Had to ask some suppliers to take a financial knock with us. Got threatened physically in the process. I personally shut down for a year or so afterwards.

But one thing that never changed, in the years since it closed in 2017, was how those five years made a massive impression on many people, so much so that wherever I went I would get asked about Warm & Glad, recognised as the owner and asked if it would open again. This became a family joke with my kids always laughing how I came to know so many people everywhere we went, with small chats or just a "hey, how are you?". My kids would look at me, I'd look at them and smile and say, warm and glad. We could be anywhere in the country. Once, while filling up at a remote petrol station on a road trip through the Karoo, and while paying for our waters and chips and crunchies, there was a tap on my shoulder and the question: "hey you used to own Warm & Glad, I loved that place. Good to see you. Are you opening it again?".

So why haven't we opened again? Still too raw, even so many years after. We were so glad we had got out before Covid. We actually couldn't imagine how we would have coped if we'd had to go through what other restaurants went through in the lockdown. So in some ways we're blessed it's gone. But in other ways I regularly wonder if we'd just stuck with the original concept, not expanded or opened up the other shops, if Warm & Glad would still be around. Most likely.

I had always wondered what had been the thing that had stuck with people so much, that the memory of a short-lived coffee shop slash restaurant slash concept store would still linger in a person's mind for years after it closed. Was it a magical combination of time, timing, people, place and product? Yes, indeed. But there was something else, something small that I know was the secret sauce. The music. Credit to Mr Nathan Redpath, otherwise known as King B, who was the manager for most of the years of Warm & Glad's life, for understanding my music angle in the space. And for taking it further, for introducing me to new music, to DJ mixes and sounds we needed. Together we made sure that the music reflected exactly what we wanted it to be - warm and glad. Soul, jazz, reggae, dub, trip hop, '90s hip hop, breakbeats, deep house (the old-school proper deep house), downtempo and some deep atmospheric drum & bass. We sold new vinyl and had Technics 1200s regularly spinning both old and new tunes. Excellent speakers - studio monitors in fact, with a separate sub - for clean, warm sound. Without people particularly noticing it, the music was the theme of Warm & Glad - the soundtrack. It was underground and eclectic, and never a pop song was played. And it was this that drew the right people to our space, a siren call to the creators, the artists, the architects, the musicians, the writers, the philosophers, the entrepreneurs, the innovators and even the art school students. A meeting place of like minds. United by a single thread - the music.

And so now, in 2026, we start something new. Called Warm & Glad Sessions. A new team, and for now, no proper home. Selling nothing. Just giving. Giving the music to whoever wants to come and listen and enjoy. Analogue where we can, quality in the sound, and warm and inviting to everyone who comes through. The first one was special, a Friday afternoon at Underbar in Craighall Park. Records were spun, chats were had, connections formed.

The Warm & Glad Sessions - one down, many more to come.