About Us

LeCafeShop Story

In true Gallic fashion, Patrick Joseph the founder of LeCafeShop.co.uk, has enjoyed a long and enduring romance with the humble cup of coffee. After growing up in the Hautes-Pyrénées area, he moved to Paris en famille at 12, and was soon to be found sipping espressos on the boulevards of the capital’s cafés.

Then, in his early twenties, while on breaks from working in a specialist vinyl record store in the city’s vibrant Châtelet-les-Halles quartier, he would café-hop here and there, sipping away, picking philosophically at a croissant or a tartine beurrée and flicking through a copy of Le Monde.

He moved to London in the early 1990’s and remembers with clear disdain his first cup of British coffee, which tasted more like weak soup brewed from dirty socks. Even when shopping in the capital’s supermarkets, when it came to coffee it was never easy to find anything that would hit his French-educated taste buds.

In 1999 came a move back to France – to the Beaujolais area north of Lyon – where, thanks to a chance meeting with an old friend, Patrick’s appreciation of great coffee moved on to a new, entirely more passionate level. The old friend was a master coffee roaster, and soon Patrick immersed himself in the world of coffee. He realised there was an opportunity to bring fine coffees to the ever growing UK market, and decided to start his own brand of gourmet coffees, Haute Culture was born.