Couple’s Toastery café inspired by foreign travels

A couple from Enniskillen have turned their life-long dream of running a speciality coffee and toastie café into a reality.

Sophie and Rossa Mac Aindriu launched The Toastery thanks to the help from the Go For It programme in association with Fermanagh and Omagh District Council.

The coffee shop serves artisan grilled cheese toasties using local baker’s bread as well as serving speciality coffee, light bites and treats.

The business owners were in part inspired by their travels to Asia, Australia and New Zealand and are now pushing on having secured a finding leg-up from the Northern Ireland and the European Regional Development Fund under the Investment for Growth and Jobs Northern Ireland (2014-2020) Programme.

Sophie explained: “The concept really came from snippets of ideas that we got on our travels and we just kind of honed into it, and that’s when The Toastery came alive.

“We had been thinking about it for years and from being away travelling and then coming home, we just decided that we wanted to get it started sooner rather than later. So, we put our heads together, contacted the Go For It programme and then it just happened.

“The experts at Go For it helped us massively as we had so many ideas and once we actually got to sit down and speak with someone they were able to fine tune the ideas, make us think a bit more analytical about every aspect of the business as well.

“The business plan helped us a great deal as it made us look at all the avenues of the business, who our target market was, what products we were going to use. It really made us sit down and think about what exactly our product offering was.”

Rossa said it felt like a dream had come true when they officially launched in February this year:

“Even now it still feels like a dream – I suppose there’s a real sense of pride. A lot of the renovations were done by us and our families were quite heavily involved, it definitely is a dream come true!

“The feedback that we have been receiving on The Toastery has been fantastic. We have local chefs coming in who love the food and just in general our customers being happy.”