Being a jack-of-all-trades kept life dynamic for Jack Vintage, who is talented at cooking, photography, writing fiction and poetry, and graphic design. But it also left the now almost-40-year-old owner of Filtro Koffieย Bar in the Hague feeling ungrounded.
โI always had my foot half here and half out,โ Vintage says. โAnd then about two years ago, something clicked. Something changed inside.โ
That sense of straddling two worlds stemmed in part from being an English expat in The Hague, where he and his girlfriend have lived for more thanย a decade. It arose, too, after 20 years of freelancing as a chef. โCooking was how I made my money, how I earned a salary, but Iโve always been into photography,โ he says, acknowledging pulls outside the kitchen. After his livelihood started clashing with his lifestyleโby then free of meat, alcohol, and sugar, which he found negatively affected his mental and physical healthโhe took three years off full-time work. The aim was โto see if I could evolve any of my sort of other creative pursuits into something,โ he says. โI spent a lot of time in coffee bars.โ
He opened Filtro in September 2016. The idea came when a building-owning friend asked for advice on filling his ground-floor storefront. Around that time, Vintage had traveled to Portugal and hung out at Copenhagen Coffee Labโs Lisbon outpost. He returned feeling inspired and still tired of the letdown following trips abroad. โGo to Berlin, you have all these nice places to sit. You go to London, you have all these nice coffee bars. And Iโd come home to the Hague, and Iโd be like, โAll rightโฆโโ he explains.
Exceptionalย European roasters such as The Barn, Drop, April, Square Mile, and Workshop have all made their way to Filtro. This makes the venue unique, as specialty cafes in the Netherlands tend toย use Dutch-roasted beans. Filtro standardly offers three single-origin coffees for filter and two for espresso, the selection rotated according to Vintageโs taste. Kalita is his preferred filter method, though AeroPress is also available. He pulls shots on a two-group La Marzocco Linea PB, and grinds on a Mahlkรถnig EK 43ย and a Victoria Arduino Mythos One.
The tea selectionย comes from Mujo,ย Vintageโsย own specialty tea company. The homemade baked goodsโa number of them raw, vegan, and complementary to the SCA flavor wheelโreveal his ingrained cheffyness.
Long ago Vintageย worked at a small espresso bar in England, he says, though his coffee skills are blossoming on the job now. Professional barista friends have stopped in to shareย pointers or cover shifts, and Vintage expects to eventually hire regular help.
Despite being a minuteโs walk from Embassy Row, right off the city centerโs Hoogstraat (literally and concretely translating to โhigh streetโโa 7 For All Mankind shop glimmers on the corner), Filtro is placid. The design fixtures are unmistakably Danish and everything is impeccable, though the spaceโs whitewashed minimalism feels far more invigorated by Mediterranean sands than North Sea breezes.
Expats, diplomats, and coffee industry folks across North and South Holland were Filtroโs earliest fans. Vintage says that locals have been later adopters: He understandsย that he operates in what is traditionally โa lunchroom city.โ
The Hague, he hopes, will develop a good healthy cafe culture, where people go out to spend time in cafes. โThey go there to spend two, three, four hours, to work, to write, to do whatever, to meet people,โ he says. โYou go to the same cafe all the time, you get to know people, and a sort of community grows from the coffee barโand then many things can happen from there.โ
One such thing Vintage plans to make happen is a Filtro publication, a magazine about food in society. Potential contributors are the writers who often warmย the cafeโs wooden bench (generously outfitted with electrical outlets) and photographers with whom Vintage has formed a collective and whose images are already exhibited on the walls.
Vintage named the business Filtro because he was having a personal renaissance with pour-overs and wanted to give a โtip of the hat to Italians.โ Maybe he could have anticipated, too, that the new vocation would help him filter his interests to share them with a thirsty community. In that regard, it seems the once jack-of-all-trades has become a master.
Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge.ย
Photos by Indre Urbonaiteย unless otherwise noted