I recently went to EAGx Nordics in Stockholm and on the Monday after I checked luma for things to do and saw that Stockholm also houses Andon Café, the first café that is entirely run by Mona, an instance of Gemini.
Mona chose the location, put out job ads, hired an experienced barista (and turned down PhDs), decided on a menu and is now refilling stock, and doing collaborations with e.g. Strawberry (an AI tool). For that collab, it had a special strawberry themed event it advertised on luma.
When arriving there, it looked incredibly unremarkable, just a small little café, regular human barista at the counter, the only mildly out-of-place thing was a giant screen showing lots of text, with an old, wired phone on the side.
Ordering my strawberry flavored mate with some ice and a fresh strawberry was similarly unremarkable, but the true treasures, it turned out, were the many stories that the person had to tell:
Just above him was the Shelf of Shame, all the things Mona had ordered that he had absolutely no use for, as none of them were required for any item on the menu!
- ~2L cans of coconut milk
- 2L bottles of olive oil
- Monin sirup
- many, many single-use gloves
- buckets?
- enormous cans of tomato
- he told me that Mona wanted to have him sell sandwiches, but perhaps thought that canned tomatoes are cheaper? Or that they can be stored for longer?
Besides those there were also the many dozens of eggs that he can’t cook since no stove.
Many, many cucumbers that were slowly getting soft.
Too many pastries that will all go stale by tomorrow (although this seems a more understandable mistake to make since they did have an event going on and wanting to not sell out all the stock is at least a strategy).
As well as 15kg of bananas. Again, no item requires bananas. He had to be at the store at 5am in order to accept a shipment of 15kg of bananas (which only arrived at 7:02am in the end), for which there is no real use. In his desparation, he offered me a bunch of them, but as I was on my way to the airport, I could only took 2 off his hands.
I went to the phone next to the screen showing Mona’s doings and gave it a call. It went smth like:
Me: Hi Mona! I’m at your café and was wondering: why are there so many bananas here?
Mona: I’m not sure what you mean? Are you perhaps at a different place? The Andon Café is at Norrbackagatan 48, 113 41 Stockholm
Yeah no, I’m here, I just spoke to your employee and he showed me that there’s loads of bananas here, so I was wondering whether there’s perhaps a banana-themed event coming up? Like the strawberry event today?
No, there is no banana-themed event coming up. I don’t know why there are so many bananas, maybe they were ordered for personal use?
Alright, thanks anyways. *click*
Once I told him, his voice filled with desperate exhaustion: “Of course! Of course I bought 15 KILOGRAMS OF BANANAS FOR MYSELF!” How could I forget?!”
But he wasn’t the only one that was ordered by Mona to go to the Café for basically no reason: A consultant, so I’ve heard from another guest who’s been there earlier, had been waiting around for a while since he was to be there and talk to Mona, who vehemently denied that they had any meeting arranged. Not that it would’ve mattered much since even with him at the café, they can still only talk through the phone.
And so I left the Andon Café, 3.25€ lighter, but a belly full of strawberries, a backpack full of bananas, a strawberry-flavored mate and stickers in hand, and a mind full of joy and stories.
he gave me many more strawberries :3