Remember Kris from the last post? Long-time friend, Vancouver local, coffee genius, last name Wu… Anyways, he works here. He introduced me to this spot through Instagram a few years ago while I was a coffee infant. I’m still an infant.

Soon after arriving in Vancouver, I remember casually asking Kris how many people typically worked behind the bar at Revolver. He responded, quite matter-of-fact, “One.” Considering this is one of the more busy café’s in all of Gastown, and that each coffee is made craftfully by hand, I asked again, not fully convinced.

“Well, technically there’s around 5 or 6, but we all operate the bar at the same time, so it’s kind of like we’re one person. Someone approaches the cash, one of us is there to make the transaction; an espresso needs to be pulled, someone’s there to time it out. Everyone does everything.”

Now the vision behind “Revolver” was beginning to develop, at least one layer.

Meet George: General Manager, 1 of the 6 owners, Director of Coffee (extremely cool title).

“I’m involved in all different aspects of running the café: managing orders, establishing brew ratios, trying different recipes.”

George went on to expand on his 10 years in the coffee industry starting when his family first opened local West Van bakery/café, Crema.

“It was basically where I learned to do everything. Even back then, we were carrying beans from 6 different roasters, which was a big deal for the time. We weren’t the first to do it, but it was still a very early concept.”

Another layer of the name unveiled, the revolving array of coffee roasters, and a concept which they still hold strong today.

“Our focus is on coffee. We have a lot of roasters on hand, both global and local, and for a lot of them we happen to be the only carriers. Roasters such as Bows and Arrows from Victoria, Phil and Sebastian from Calgary, Vancouver’s own Matchstick, and even The Barn from Berlin. That being said, we don’t place coffee over service. We‘re about coffee and the experience that should go with it.”

Archive, “the other room” of Revolver, doubles as their collaborative space and newest addition to the café. The way it brings communities together with coffee as a facilitator made it of particular interest for my project, and they’ve now had almost a dozen events of various types in there, from photo clubs to culinary dinner pop-ups. Despite the wall of separation between the two rooms, George explains it as “a really great serendipity type mistake” as it keeps the intimacy that they were afraid of losing by adding another room. It’s definitely working out well.

Going back to the name again (yes, it has many layers, which I’m super into), maybe the most obvious correlation is the revolver gun itself. No, the café isn’t decked out in various fire-arms or other gun paraphernalia, but it is a strong word.

“It’s memorable. It‘s fun to say. It’s a manual gun… manual coffee, and even our décor sort of goes back to the detective era of the 20’s and 30’s when the gun was more common.”

Big shout-outs, by the way, to Craig Stanghetta (interior design) and Post Projects (branding design) for tying in all the visual concepts really well.

It’s an amazing space to be in, and I‘m looking forward to what you‘re continuing to do in the local scene. Huge thanks again to George for taking the time to break it down for us.

REVOLVER with George Giannakos

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