If the success of a good cafe is helping customers to carve out a special little space in their day then Glasgow’s Cup Tea Lounge has got it in the bag, with its decor even more opulent than the multi-tier trays it serves loaded with sandwiches, cakes and bakes. Home to the Bank of India when it first opened back in the 1890s, many of the premises’ beautiful South Asian-flavoured original features have been lovingly preserved and incorporated into the design – from colourful wall tiling embossed with chrysanthemum flowers to grand pillared archways and geometric mosaic flooring. It’s an Instagrammer’s dream.
“It’s a stunning building,” says Cup owner Paul Reynolds of the Renfield Street gem, which has housed his flagship business for seven years now. “We’re the custodians of it more than anything else,” he adds.
A slice of Glasgow life passes through here of an average day and night because, as Reynolds puts it, Cup has “a dual personality”. Between 9am and 5pm it’s Glasgow’s premiere destination for high tea, serving sweet and savoury treats and 48 different blends from its own Ambr Tea range to a diverse swathe of people – from mums and daughters enjoying a cuppa and a catch up, to groups of friends and families celebrating special occasions, tourists lured in by the lavish interior, shoppers looking for a post-spree pick-me-up and city centre workers simply taking a quiet breakfast or lunch. Then from 5pm until late it becomes Gin71, a classy, low-key cocktail nightspot so popular with a younger clientele that it’s not unusual to see queues for a table snaking around the corner outside at weekends.
Two different offerings, two different audiences – even two different sets of staff. One single shared ethos focused on warm, friendly, well-informed service, and creating a distinctive social and community space for the Glasgow public whoever they may be, whether they’re thirsty for ginseng or a gin sling.
Regular customer Rory Angus; interior details
Having worked on and off in the catering industry in the UK and the US since he was 16, in roles ranging from restaurant kitchen porter to sales and marketing director for a major international hotel chain, Reynolds’ journey towards opening Cup has been a long one, and certainly taught him a thing or two about good hospitality. “I realised very quickly that my DNA says: ‘This is what I’m about and I’m not going to change that,’” he says, remembering a key juncture a decade ago when he dabbled with a career switch. Instead, Reynolds opened the first incarnation of Cup on Byres Road in Glasgow’s West End in 2010, and hasn’t looked back since, expanding to several outlets across the city. “It’s all about the welcome and goodbye, and about being well looked after,” he says. “Our team are great hosts.”
It does no harm either that they’re rooted in two huge growth industries. “The tea market grows faster than the coffee market every year,” Reynolds points out, for the benefit of anyone assuming hipster coffee shops have got the hot drinks market cornered, “because the variation of tea over coffee is much bigger.”
Gin, too, is enjoying a massive boom, with new craft distilleries coming online all the time. “When we opened we tried to find 71 Scottish gins,” says Reynolds of Gin71, which derives its name from its building number, “but at that point there were only 55. As of today there are something like 260 Scottish gins. So in just five years you can see how the market has grown.”
Helping everything along the way is iZettle, a payment platform that offers Cup benefits in terms of flexibility, transparent pricing, speed and ease of use. “What it does is allows us to have an affordable point-of-sale system, and it’s a simple payment system as well,” says Reynolds. “We do quite a lot of outside events, and we’re able just to lift our till system and use it in a remote location, both for payments and for recording sales.
Cup owner Paul Reynolds
“Here in the tea room we’ll have several sellers on the floor at any time, and each of them will have an iPad that can take payment. So you’re not doing the whole waiting about to get a card machine thing – you pay right away. The speed and affordability of it enables our servers to give much better service to customers.”
Cup is definitely doing something right if regular customer Rory Angus is any judge – he’s in so often that the staff know his favourite breakfast order off by heart. “If I go into the office, and I have not been in here in the morning my day is kind of out of sync,” he smiles. “I come in here, I get my poached eggs on toast, it’s a routine. I know everybody in here, they’re a very friendly bunch, and the experience is just great.”
Cup serves afternoon tea daily
As the director of a financial guidance company based nearby, Angus uses Cup for business as well as pleasure. “For me it’s just a great start to my day, in all honesty; it’s a beautiful building and it’s great for meetings as well. I think it can be quite formal at the same time as relaxed. It ticks all the boxes.”
Husband and wife team Sadia and Zarrar Chishti run an international IT business together, and are familiar faces at Cup as well. “We come here about once a week,” says Sadia. “It’s just a nice quiet, calm area. We can discuss work, but we can just have time together as a family, too.”
The tea’s not bad either, reckons Zarrar. “I think they put something funny in that,” he laughs, pointing to the empty pot on the table, “because it makes me want to keep coming back.”
