After twenty-four years of living in the UK I still come across British weather words I’ve never heard before. Mizzling is one of them, and that’s exactly what it’s doing today as I head down the M1 on my way to Queen’s Park, London, home to Kayan Specialty Coffee.
I park in the free motorcycle bay on Winchester Avenue and make my way into Kayan Specialty Coffee on Salisbury Road. The interior has a clean, modern feel, built around a long counter finished in deep green tiles that give the space a calm, grounded look. The espresso machine sits front and centre, flanked by grinders and neatly arranged barista tools, all of it signaling a shop that takes its coffee seriously.
I order my coffee and sit down with Haider, the owner and founder, to talk through how twenty years in an office brought him here. Feather by Sabrina Carpenter plays quietly above us. As Haider talks, I sip the americano made by Islam, the barista behind the bar.
Where the Kayan Name Came From
Kayan is the Arabic word for existence. Haider had a shortlist of other names in mind, including The Espresso Lab, a safer and more mainstream option. Kayan felt more distinctive. Born in London to an Iraqi family, leaning into that background made sense and it became something the shop could build around.
You see that identity immediately. The iced latte painted across the front window turns dates into a calling card and date biscuits sit under a glass dome which is impossible to miss. “Everyone’s into their sweet flavours,” Haider said. “Whereas in my case it’s the dates that we try to push the narrative.”
Finding Queen’s Park
Haider was never a resident of Queen’s Park, but he went to school in the area decades ago and always thought highly of it. When the chance came up to take over a former café site on Salisbury Road, he took it, fully aware of what he was stepping into. “It’s very competitive,” he said. “There are lots of established high street chains here. That’s where we fall behind. It takes a while to set up a business.”
Kayan opened in March this year, which meant the shop went straight into its first summer with no real sense of what a quiet month even looked like. Footfall was inconsistent. “I was told not to close down,” he said, “because we had an extremely quiet summer.” What kept him going was noticing the cluster of schools and nurseries around the shop, five or six schools and several nurseries within easy reach, which he now sees as the real long term pull once term time settles back in.
The early months brought plenty of practical setbacks too. There was no air conditioning during a heatwave. The display fridge broke down. The water filter on the coffee machine ran out. A faulty grinder had to be replaced entirely. Even the exterior needed attention; the old decking had cracked and started leaking, so Haider put a few hundred pounds into matching it to the interior. “It’s been relentless,” he said. “Continuously meeting the perfection that we want it to be.”
From Sales to Specialty Coffee
Before any of this, Haider spent twenty years in a sales job, sitting in an office. When he resigned, the plan was simple: enjoy life, get back to his hobbies. That meant getting on a bike, sometimes riding fifteen or twenty miles, purely in search of good coffee. “My only objective of the day was to visit good coffee shops,” he said. He struggled to find one that actually gave him a “wow” moment, plenty had great coffee, but nothing that fully stopped him in his tracks. As I listened I realised that Haider could have been describing my own habit of visiting coffee shops, except his version involves a push bike and sounds healthier.
Then the opportunity to own a shop came along, and it lined up almost exactly with finding beans he truly believed in. “These beans are probably the best I’ve tasted,” he said, describing the moment he first tried them. They’re roasted for Kayan by Simba Bru Coffee, based in Watford. “They’re non-commercial. Hand-picked, women-only farm,” he said. Opening the shop and finding the beans happened at almost the same time, and from there, the two were never separate decisions.
The house blend at Kayan leans into a classic comfort profile: chocolate and caramel first, with a small lift of fruitiness that keeps it lively. With Brazil and Colombia as its base and a mix of natural and washed processing, it’s built to be sweet, steady and crowd-pleasing.
A Mentor in Abbas
Abbas runs Simba Bru and he has become something closer to a mentor than a supplier. Haider found him the way most good coffee connections happen, through word of mouth from other coffee lovers, then visited and kept coming back. Abbas delivered Kayan’s beans in person the night before we spoke.
Before Haider had even opened his own shop, he studied Abbas’s shop from a distance. “I would look at a lot of coffee shops. I don’t know who the owners are. I would study everything about it,” he said. “I just thought it was easy, and it’s anything but.” Since opening, the two have leaned on each other in ways that go well beyond a supplier relationship. Abbas has told Haider he sees a lot of himself in him, and admitted there were days early on where he broke down entirely. Haider has had his own version of those days too.
The Sticky Date Iced Latte
Kayan’s signature drink, drawn right onto the shop’s front window, traces back to Haider’s daughter. She loves flavoured coffee drinks, the kind that tend to go viral at chains, and the family started asking what a version of that might look like done well, and done uniquely to Kayan, something that couldn’t just be found on any high street.
They tested recipes at home for a while. Different date syrups, whether to blend actual dates or buy a ready syrup, even trying a mainstream Iraqi syrup that came out too sour. Eventually they landed on the version now on the menu: organic date syrup, condensed milk, and a double shot of espresso. “It’s literally no sugar,” Haider said. “Just organic date syrup.” It’s become the shop’s clear bestseller. Of every ten cups sold, seven or eight are the Sticky Date, a sign that people were truly fed up of the usual vanilla and caramel syrups everywhere else and wanted something that actually tasted different.
Coffee First, Careful About the Rest
Ceremonial matcha also made it onto the menu, again partly his daughter’s influence, and partly because matcha has become a real revenue driver for coffee shops generally. But Haider was not keen on letting it become the focus too early. “I really wanted the core of the business, the coffee, to be what I perfected first,” he said.
That focus shows in the detail. A barista named Philip comes in on Fridays and has taken the coffee side seriously from day one, recalibrating the grinder weekly, dialling in the machines, and developing the shop’s own V60 recipe. The V60 is the drink Haider is personally proudest of, even though he’s learned through running the shop that Americanos are what people actually order most.
The team beyond Philip includes talent from around the globe and they rotate through service together: Islam, a Spanish barista with experience at Notes Coffee on Bond Street, Milena, a Brazilian barista, and an Irish barista named Moira. Haider has stepped back from the counter more than he expected to, not because he wanted distance, but because he knows his own limits under pressure. “If I get five, six, seven people ordering all at once, complicated combinations, soya milk lattes, extra hot chocolates, I’d rather have a trained professional on it,” he said. “That’s what they can do. They can manage it.” He’s still behind the counter most weekend mornings, and pours in most days in some capacity, just not always at the sharp end of a rush.
What Success Looks Like
For now, success is measured in smaller, more immediate terms. On a good day, that’s around a hundred cups. “If we hit a hundred, I’m happy. I feel that success,” he said, with hopes of growing toward 150 or 200 over the next six months. The real marker for Haider is loyalty. “When I find the regulars come back, the locals come back, that’s when you feel like you’ve made it,” he said, pointing again to Abbas and the community Simba Bru has built as the model he’d love to eventually reach. He knows that he hasn’t got there yet. He wants to get more rooted in the community too and reaching out to local running and cycling groups is on his list, but so far, most of his time has gone into simply getting the shop itself right.
Learning as He Goes
Kayan is extremely well-reviewed, with the overwhelming majority of comments praising the coffee quality, friendly staff, calm atmosphere, and signature drinks. Instead of offering free drinks or discounts to encourage feedback, he lets reviews come in on their own and replies to every one, good or bad.
The shift from two decades in an office to running a coffee shop day to day caught him off guard in ways he didn’t fully expect, not the hours so much, more the constant demand for everything to be right, all the time. Stock, freshness, waste management, none of it lets up the way a desk job does. His original plan had been smaller too, coffee-only, a modest counter operation, before he was persuaded that food needed to be part of it if the shop was going to work.
On my visit today the counter had croissants, muffins, pain au chocolat, alongside spinach and feta pastries and big, dark chocolate cookies. Everything’s laid out on branded paper, matching the décor of the rest of the shop.
None of it has been easy, and Haider doesn’t pretend otherwise. But he talks about the hardest parts with a real smile on his face. “It just feels like a big relief,” he said, of the last few months now sitting behind him as history rather than a daily fight. Six months from opening, that’s the version of success he’s actually chasing, just people who keep choosing to come back.
Kayan Specialty Coffee | 17 College Parade, Salusbury Road, Queen’s Park, London NW6 6RN | Open daily | Motorcycle parking: free bay on Winchester Avenue | Instagram: @kayancoffeelondon
