Just a few hours after the launch of its equity crowdfunding campaign on CrowdBnk, London-based Kipferl easily bested its funding goal of £125,000. The coffee house and restaurant has been bringing Viennese food to North London’s Angel neighborhood for over a decade. Now that the campaign has been 100% success, the founder and owner Christian Malnig announced the opening of a second site.
According to the campaign’s website, Kipferl quickly gained a fine reputation thanks to its authentic and high quality cakes, sausages, Viennese coffee varieties and Austrian staples. Londoners enjoy going out and trying new things and we soon realized the café was getting too small to accommodate all our fans. As such, we decided to close the café and open a proper Viennese coffeehouse and kitchen instead.
In April 2011, following years of planning and searching for the perfect site, we opened a café at 20 Camden Passage after it was re-designed by London-based Austrian designer Benedict Wilhelm. The offering is wider with the full breadth of Austrian food and drink, from spicy Hungarian gulyas soup to the famous Wiener Schnitzel, from the eponymous Vanillekipferl to the classic Sachertorte ‘mit Schlag’ (with cream) and from herbal Almdudler lemonade to a peppery Gruener Veltliner wine. The concept of Kipferl is based on the Viennese coffeehouse, where you can sit on your own with a ‘kleiner Brauner’ reading newspapers for hours or have a full three-course dinner with friends in the evening.
During a recent interview with BigHospitality, Malnig stated, “It won’t be exactly the same as the site we have now, but we’ll take the concept across. The next site is a little bit smaller, especially the kitchen, so we’re probably going to keep it a bit simpler. What we’ll do is take the best sellers across from the Angel restaurant, which will still be the flagship site. New one should be a very busy location though.”
He continued, “The decor and atmosphere will be similar; we’re using the same designer as we did for the first site. We’ll keep some of the design elements so that people can recognize it.”
With the new expansion, Malnig noted that he still plans to keep what he calls the restaurant’s “four pillars in mind, which are the following:
- Quaity
- Attention to Detail
- Consistency
- Authenticity
Also sharing why he turned to the crowdfunding platform to begin with, Malnig said, “The main reason I looked at crowdfunding was to bring in outside restaurant expertise, which I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. I also thought it would make the company more marketable to the outside, so it was not just a friends and family business.”
Founder and chief executive of CrowdBnk, Ayan Mitra praised the restaurant and added, “Kipferl shows that it’s business not the decor that matters when it comes to crowdfunding. Identifying a successful concept driven by passionate owners who are committed to taking their business to the next level is a defining feature of CrowdBnk.”
“For those business owners in the hospitality sector who are looking to fund their expansion or refurbishment using an alternative financing solution, Kipferl is proof that crowdfunding works.”
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