Glasgow Food and Drink Stories: Glasgow was the perfect place to start our speciality coffee shop and now we're expanding
A popular specialty coffee shop in the Merchant City has completed its move to a new, larger location on High Street after 10 successful years at its Candleriggs location.
The coffee shop has proven popular since first opening a decade ago and has outgrown its original Candleriggs location, which it has operated in addition to a further location on Great Western Road.
The new shop has opened on Glasgow’s High Street and Danny Gorton, who runs Spitfire Espresso alongside his wife Emily Gorton, explained where they see Spitfire’s place in the market.
He said: “Spitfire Espresso is a specialty coffee cafe. So we're kind of crossing the bridge between high-end coffee and high-end food and also just a really good environment, fun times.”
Despite being a mainstay on the Glasgow coffee scene, the origins of the popular coffee spots are rooted in the other side of the world, in New Zealand where Danny is from.
He said: “We got married in 2012. We were living in London. and we shipped off to New Zealand, and we'd been working in offices, and I fell back into the hospitality trade and got a job working for a startup coffee roastery. I was moving into basically specialty coffee in my hometown, and I was working with a roaster there.
“I was learning about the third wave of coffee at the same time as about what specialty coffee is.”
Danny is passionate about coffee and was entering the industry as it truly began to take off in New Zealand - and he was keen to make his own mark.
He said: “I love the industry, and I love everything about it. I like the way that you can develop it and you can kind of deep dive into it. And so we thought we could maybe bring that. Because we'd just come out of the UK and it wasn't really taken off in the same way as it was happening in New Zealand at that point. That was like 2012. So we just thought, ‘where's a good place?’”
Emily is a Glasgow-native and saw the city as the perfect testing ground as they tried to create something new.
She explained: “It was a good choice just to come back to Glasgow and have family and friends around us as we tried to create something that we were really new in.
“My background is in fashion buying, so I had an idea of how to run budgets, how to do all the background stuff. So in terms of setting the business up, that was me, and Dan was all about coffee and personality and hospitality.”
After 10 years on Candleriggs, Danny and Emily said they are excited by what is happening in the city’s High Street area and were keen to get involved.
Emily said: “We just love what's happening in this part of the city. The High Street's changing and we just wanted to be part of the early wave of that.
“There's some other great places up and down High Street now and I just feel like as the city changes this was the right place to be.”