This Blue Bottle Cafe Is Constructed Out Of Legos

Lee, the Mint Plaza’s lead siphon barista, worked for more than 100 hours over the course of a couple months modeling our Mint Plaza cafe out of Legos. He began with the space’s various brewing apparatuses – its La Marzocco Linea, vintage San Marco, siphon bar and slow-drip cold brew machines – then expanded his scope to include every last table and counter. Most of it, he says, was done purely from memory.

“The layout I wouldn’t have been able to get down so well if I hadn’t worked there so much,” Lee says. “A lot of the details, I’d take a reference photo so I could go back.”

So what exactly possesses a barista to spend his free time modeling a café out of toys? We’d like to think it’s the same meticulous attention to detail that made him such a whiz behind the siphon bar.

“If I get into something, I really get into it,” he says. “That was definitely the case with this.”

The space isn’t exactly to scale, but it is nonetheless extremely detailed: Along with its flower display, newspaper racks and condiment station, Lee added a hat, which belongs to one of Mint’s regulars (a gentleman named Bob). It hangs on a hook in one corner of the café.

“I actually have a full Bob mini-figure,” he says. “But if you look at the stools, they’re smooth on the top, so he wouldn’t be able to be securely sat down. But yeah, the Bob mini-figure exists.”