All about things and people
DIFFERENT: STORE THAT OFFERS IT ALL, FROM GOOD MUSIC TO GOOD COFFEE IN STYROFOAM CUPS
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she’s inside the Moral Kiosk.
Even before my first eye-opening caffeine of the day, it’s obvious I’ve stumbled into someplace unique. Melville, a bit like the Bree Street area of Cape Town, features so many outstanding restaurants and exciting drinks places that it has its own food tour for visitors and locals alike.
They taste small versions of famous dishes at many of the hippest places and chat with the chefs and owners.
Oddly enough, the tour starts at this non-restaurant, the Moral Kiosk. Admittedly, it serves remarkably good coffees in styrofoam cups that are illustrated by artist-barrista, Lou Gwillie.
Ranged around the walls are vinyls of a most collectable kind, books, many about musicians, and a stunning fashion range of real but new millinery, bright felt berets and hats by Simon & Mary, also pre-loved Docs and cowboy boots, even lurex platform boots, rails of leather and vintage.
The tour group jostles around Josh Georgiou the owner, music fundi, known for his Hugh Masekela connection.
He’s talking about Masekela’s The Boy’s Doin’ It album from 1975, recorded in Nigeria and dedicated to Fela Kuti, about where the iconic picture was taken and how.
He says this very cool coffee, wi-fi and things shop is just like it is because it’s all stuff he really loves, named after the 2007 REM song. Of course he also has that vinyl.
Just behind the old Melville shop-door, Nicola sees a steady flow of customers for her tarot and reiki combo sessions.
I hear her saying something like “let it flow”.
Then there’s Quiet who stalks in and out, tall, rangy and unmissably dressed. The red-coat uniforms in the window are his, the vintage and leather clothes.
A tour member tries on a powder blue leather coat, astonished at her luck. Quiet Mnqali unabashedly tells me he’s “the legend”.
It’s pretty full today but I’m impressed to hear that 44 people, apart from me, can be seated here for, say, a Vusi Mahlasela show.
Still listening to lyrics gently delivered by Marvin Gaye, the tour group, including a pale blue coat, starts leaving for Pablo Eggs Go Bar, a couple of doors up 7th street. I’m still wondering if this place is about the things or the people.
Heather was here on a different day and enjoyed hanging outside. But, as REM averred, “it’s so much more attractive inside the moral kiosk”.