About East Village Coffee

Hi, I’m Jonny Barr, owner of East Village Coffee. I set up EVC in 2016 in the heart of my hometown of Clondalkin. I had long had a dream of opening my own cafe or restaurant, having always been a big food & drink enthusiast. My first idea was to open ‘The Sandwich Barr’ as sandwiches are my favourite meal in the world. Reportedly my first words spoken were “cheese sandwich” However I started to see how coffee culture was really starting to take off in Ireland with a big influence from cities like London & Melbourne. So I switched my focus to a cafe serving high quality coffee.

I worked away for many years in a finance role for a multinational and pushed my dreams to the side. However I eventually built up the courage to take a leap of faith and left my job of 14 years to begin a new adventure. I spent the next 18 months working in hospitality in delis, cafes and restaurants. I took ‘Start Your Own Business’ courses, barista courses and even a professional cookery course. All the while I honed my business plan and was scouting Dublin for the right location in which to open. I had been living away from Clondalkin for many years at this stage but still had friends and family there, and I kept coming back to Clondalkin thinking it could be a great venue for my new business. Clondalkin village at this time lacked any modern style cafes and I knew there were many people just like me who enjoyed this new wave of speciality coffee & avo toast :)

There were a few delays and false starts along the way, but we found a great unit in the heart of the village and fully renovated it to create an amazing space and we eventually opened our doors in November 2016. We couldn’t have been happier with how quickly the people of Clondalkin bought into what we wanted to create. The cafe was busy from day one and the atmosphere was fun and warm hearted and we worked so hard to make great coffee and food. From my extensive research, what I noticed, that so many do not, is that any place can serve great coffee or fantastic food. The real skill comes in doing all of that but you have to create a great atmosphere. People can make food and coffee at home, they don’t come to us because they are hungry or thirsty, they come to EVC because it’s an amazing space full of happiness and warmth.

The years have passed by so quickly ever since and along the way there have been so many ups and downs. Mostly ups though. We won the ‘Best Coffee Shop’ in Dublin award from 98FM, our head chef Viv who helped me so much to get the business off the ground passed away unexpectedly and that was so shocking, we had great write ups in national newspapers, we made some money and invested it back into the business by continually renovating and improving our premises and the customer experience, we’ve had floods, snow-ins, power cuts and equipment break downs, we survived Covid by pivoting our business model about 10 times during that crazy period, we were very proud to set up East Village at The Round Tower and that ran for a couple of years until it was not a viable business, we had a pop-up for 6 months in Tallaght and all along the way we have had over 90 staff members work at EVC and so many of them have been brilliant (and some have been crap) and helped to create the amazing vibe that our customers cherish.

The plan for the future is to continue to be that heartbeat of Clondalkin village and continue to serve quality coffee and food in that warm environment we’ve created hopefully for many years to come. We are now looking at re-creating that same culture we’ve developed in Lucan village, and beyond.