I’m staying around four miles outside Rhodes Town, so today’s transport is a rented 80cc scooter. Engine size, I’ve learned, matters little on these bumpy roads and it’s easy to settle into the freedom the small bike gives you. I circle the town past the cruise ships docked in the harbour and turn onto a narrow street where Monk Coffee/The Pure Roasters sits behind a courthouse, parking right in front, next to the shop’s own delivery scooter. Inside, I order a double espresso and sit down with Panagiotis Aggelou, one of the founders, to talk through how his specialty coffee shop survived a pandemic launch, lost two of its three founders, and became one of the few real specialty coffee spots on the island.
The Name
Monk’s menu clarifies the thinking behind the name. “As a monk devotes himself faithfully to God, such is our devotion to coffee. When reversing the word monk, the word know is formed, meaning knowledge, which is something we constantly enrich at Monk Coffee when it comes to the quality of our coffee.” The name itself came from a friend of the founders, a logo and brand designer who already knew them well enough to build the concept from scratch. “We gave him the idea…and he created this,” Panagiotis said. It stuck straight away, right down to a monk-themed wallpaper added during a later refresh of the shop.
Three Guys and a Gap in the Market
Monk started with three founders, each bringing something different. Panagiotis came from cocktails, having worked in two bars before this. One partner had a coffee background. The third was a roaster. Between them, they spotted a gap. “It was a period in Greece where specialty coffee was rising,” Panagiotis told me. “…here there was nothing, only commercial coffee…so we found the gap and we said, why not.”
They opened in 2019. Six years later, Panagiotis reckons Monk is one of a small handful of specialty coffee shops actually operating on Rhodes. Another, Unik Specialty Coffee Brewers, run by two brothers, opened more recently and doesn’t roast in-house, though Panagiotis speaks about them more like fellow travellers than competition.
From Roasting In-House to a Partnership in Athens
Monk used to roast its own beans on site. That changed when the founding partner who handled the roasting left for Amsterdam. Rather than replace him locally, Monk shifted to a partnership with a roaster in Athens, and the change solved a problem. Roasting several single-origin beans at a small scale on an island had been a real headache. “It was difficult for us because we couldn’t handle the three different beans…” Panagiotis said, meaning stock going stale before it could sell. The Athens partnership removed that pressure. “Now we have the opportunity to take single-origin beans because they roast also for themselves,” he said, “and we have created our blend and we roast it there.”
Opening Into a Pandemic
Monk opened in 2019 and had barely got going before the pandemic hit. “It was a little difficult because we started the shop, we started working, and at the time we start finding our balance, and the pandemic came,” Panagiotis said. When restrictions eased slightly, the only option was takeaway, no seating inside, and that narrow window actually helped promote their brand. With everyone out walking rather than sitting anywhere for long, people started gathering outside for coffee, enough that Panagiotis laughs about it now. “It wasn’t very legal…it was a little bit crowded, because everybody came by to take a coffee.” It kept the business running and put the name in front of far more people than it might otherwise have reached. “At the beginning it wasn’t very good,” he said, “but at the end it helped us.”
A Spot That Had Already Failed Once
Choosing this location, close to the beach but not on the busiest stretch of town, came down to what Panagiotis calls luck. This unit had already cycled through three previous tenants, the most recent also a coffee shop that hadn’t survived. Panagiotis credits reputation. “We had the privilege that we were well known on the island for what we do,” he said. The previous owner had reportedly opened the shop for his own daughters without being fully behind the idea himself. “They didn’t give so much love and passion,” Panagiotis said. Being next to the courthouse turned out to help too, with a steady stream of lawyers and court visitors passing the door daily.
What’s Changed, and What Hasn’t
I asked Panagiotis what’s changed in the shop since 2019, and the answer is: not much, until very recently. “We are focused on doing the same thing, to make a good cup of coffee,” he said. Monk is mid-way through its first real renovation in six years, rebuilding the bar into a space that used to be smaller, with plans to eventually split the shop into a takeaway front and a dedicated seated area elsewhere. The product itself has stayed the same. “This is something that most people recognise about us,” he said. They’ve started introducing different bean origins beyond the usual Brazilian staple, “but we’re keeping the same style since the day we opened.”
The Scandinavian-leaning interior, raw wood, matte black fixtures, came with the space and Monk just kept them. What Monk added were smaller touches: the monk-branded wallpaper, and splitting large communal tables into smaller ones better suited to how people actually use the shop.
Built for Remote Workers, By Accident
Monk’s following among remote workers and digital nomads wasn’t planned. It emerged after the pandemic, one person telling another until it became part of the daily rhythm of the place. “We hadn’t thought about it,” Panagiotis said. Word of mouth spread that it was a laptop-friendly space and they ran with it.
The Smell That Pulls People In
Panagiotis credits the product first, and a real local preference for supporting something homegrown, for why people choose Monk over the bigger names nearby. But there’s a more physical pull at work too. “If you go by the shop, it smells like coffee,” he said. In fact, following my chat with Panagiotis, I got talking to a British couple and their path here was exactly that. They had planned to go to the Starbucks nearby but were taken in by the strong smell of coffee. Not every walk-in ends in a sale. “Sometimes they want something like an iced caramel and caramel chocolate,” he said, the kind of drink Monk simply doesn’t do. “But it’s okay.”
Locals, Tourists, and Talking to the Wrong Person in English
The split between locals and tourists runs close to even, busiest in the mornings and around one to two in the afternoon, with a heavier lean toward visitors from abroad in summer. It’s thrown up an odd side effect: staff have got so used to speaking English with international customers that they sometimes default to it automatically. “Sometimes we are confused and we’re talking English even to the locals,” Panagiotis said, laughing.
What Makes It Distinctly Monk
Ask Panagiotis what actually separates Monk from other shops on the island, and he points to something technical: patience during extraction. Staff are trained to watch the shot all the way through, checking the extraction before serving, even at the busiest hour of the morning. “We weigh the grounded coffee and we weigh the extraction to see if it is okay,” he said. “We are keeping our standards very high.”
He’s well aware that it makes the job harder. And there are other options elsewhere on an island where seasonal hospitality work is easy to find and pays just as well. Staffing remains a real pressure point. Monk restructured its bar into two stations, one for iced coffee, one for hot, to smooth out service during the morning rush. At the time we spoke, they were also down a staff member after an accident. “He had an accident and broke his finger,” Panagiotis said. “So he’s out for a month.” The shop runs close to flat out year-round regardless, seven in the morning until seven at night, six days a week.
Delivery by Scooter
A Monk-branded scooter parked outside, the one now sitting next to the one I rode in on, points to another side of the business: delivery across the town centre, to offices, houses, and even the beach, throughout the working day. “They can order online,” Panagiotis said. “So they are calling us and we send in the coffee…anytime during the working hours.” It’s been part of the shop since it opened, and Panagiotis treats it as unremarkable, since coffee delivery by scooter is common across Greece generally.
What’s Next
Six years in, and after a difficult stretch when Panagiotis’s original co-founders both left, leaving him to rebuild the staffing and direction largely on his own, Monk is finally finding steadier ground. “The other two guys left. So I stayed alone, and it was a difficult period,” he said. Expansion is on the table now, with plans for one or two additional locations further out, aimed at customers who currently travel into the centre just for coffee. “We have many people that live far from here, and they are coming just to take coffee,” he said. A retail beans operation, briefly run before the pandemic disrupted shipping logistics, also remains on the list of things to bring back.
Two Bikers Talking Coffee
Somewhere in the middle of all this, it comes out that Panagiotis rides too, a Harley-Davidson 48, 1200cc. It’s an unexpected detail, but for a moment it turns the interview into two people who happen to both ride, talking about coffee instead of bikes for once.
The Standard Behind Everything
Asked what people might not pick up on from reviews alone, Panagiotis comes back to something simple. “The only thing that we want to have, it’s our philosophy, is that all the products that we have are very good,” he said. That standard extends from the espresso into everything built around it: premium soft drinks, house-made lemonades, their own chocolate and teas. “We try to have the same standard, same quality,” he said.
The Double Shot, Served Separately
After years behind the counter, not much surprises Panagiotis anymore, but one request has stuck with him. A customer once asked for a double espresso pulled as two separate shots rather than combined into one drink. “It’s a little bit weird because it’s, you know, it’s a double shot,” he said. She hadn’t tried the standard version first. She simply wanted it done that way from the start. Monk made it anyway. “We accept it all…” he said, with the same easy shrug he brings to most of what running a specialty coffee shop on a small Greek island has thrown at him over the years.
Monk Coffee/The Pure Roasters is on Ethnarxou Makariou, a short walk from the beach in Rhodes Town, open seven in the morning until seven in the evening, six days a week. Worth following your nose down that narrow street.
