We are a specialty coffee shop in Blackpool on the North West coast of the UK. Blackpool is our hometown, a place that usually specialises in penny arcades, inflatable beach balls and hot, sugary doughnuts on the promenade.
It does not have a coffee culture…yet.
We are the beginning of that, although we hope very much not to be the end.
We also do food, a small but punchy offering with our low-waste aspirations and limited space leading us to indulge/torment customers with preserved, fermented and dehydrated additions to dishes.
Our food is usually plant-based or vegetarian as none of the staff eat meat and we like to eat what we cook. Speaking of plants, the ones we don’t cook we instead use to decorate the shop, keep us sane and even sell.
Coffee – food – plants: that is Upside Down.
Ryan Green met Rob Gomm at the all-Lancashire Connect Four championships in 2018. Ryan won, as usual, being a savant at the popular tabletop game.
At the time, Ryan worked in the family business at their café Shaw’s whilst Rob had completed an apprenticeship in catering.
Rob decided to seek out his Connect Four nemesis for lessons on latte art, learning quickly that it was a largely meaningless skill at least compared to the making of espressos. Ryan, you see, had discovered light roasted coffee and introduced Rob to this fruity nirvana, the espresso being where much of this magic begins.
Rob started working at Shaw’s and, when Ryan’s mum could no more take working with two overgrown teenagers and left for greener pastures, they started their own business which became Upside Down.
The other two members of the team are:
Reshmi Chanda, known affectionately as ‘Resh Boss’ for making sure the two lads actually do work. She also has an increasingly deep knowledge of plants and plant related things, so she’s in charge of not killing them. Do not get her started on Winston Churchill, though.
Jake Huxley, known affectionately as 'Jake’, was kitchen manager at Manchester vegan junk food kings V Rev and takes up that role with us except untitled and for less money. He likes to decimate his vocal cords as lead singer of hardcore band Going Off, releasing their first full album in 2020.
