Twins who caused a stir in east London after opening a café selling just bowls of cereal, are looking to conquer Camden after launching a branch in Stables Market.
Gary and Alan Keary, originally from Belfast, opened their latest Cereal Killer Café last week, serving more than 120 different varieties of cereal from around the world, to go with 40 types of milk and 20 toppings.
The novel concept comes complete with beds as seating, mini-televisions playing shows from the ’90s, and cereal boxes lining the walls. Customers can also enjoy morning breakfast “raves” with top DJs.
The opening comes just six months after the pair launched their first cereal café – to much controversy – in Brick Lane, Shoreditch.
Describing the Camden store as “bigger and better”, Gary told the Ham&High: “We were naturally drawn to Camden. There’s a lot of music, a lot of art, a lot of creative people around here. Plus, there’s a lot of tourists as well. So I thought it just fitted really well.
“I think we’re offering something a little different as well. It’s a bit of fun.
“We wanted it to be an extension of the Brick Lane café. We didn’t want it to exactly the same, we wanted to make it bigger and better. So we managed to get twice the space that we’ve got at Brick Lane so we were able to add things in like this wall of cereals, the single beds in there, get in a Wrestlemania machine [arcade machine]; just to really play on the whole nostalgia thing that we were playing on in Brick Lane, but we decided to take it a step further for here.”
The pair found themselves at the receiving end of both sympathy and criticism during the opening of their first café when a Channel 4 News reporter criticised them for charging £3 per bowl of cereal in an area of high poverty.
Describing their media treatment as “unfair”, Gary said: “I don’t think it would be fair to go into any business on their opening day and start bombarding them with questions like that.
“At the end of the day, we’re a business and we have to make a profit otherwise I would not be in business. He could have gone in and asked the same questions to any other shop in the whole of London: ‘You are selling something and you are making profit on it, do you think that’s fair?’ That’s basically what the end of the question was.
“But it did really good things for us publicity wise. We still had a lot of people that supported us and thought that that guy was being an a***hole. Again, there was a lot of people that agreed with him and thought we were being d***heads.”
He added: “We are supporting charities. We’ve been doing some work with Magic Breakfast. But we’re still a start-up business. We’ve only been open a few months. It’s not something we’ve doing in Camden just yet – we only opened yesterday. But it is something that we will be doing.”
The twins plan to launch a cereal-inspired cookbook later this year, featuring cornflake chicken and Weetabix veggie burgers.
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