Couple's cafe-bookshop idea is in Rude health...
YOU might wonder at the name of a new cafe cum coffee bar and second hand bookshop on Sheffield's Abbeydale Road. It's called The Rude Shipyard.
It just happens to be a quote from Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, "one of my favourite novels," says Peter David, the lanky co-owner of the cafe along with Sally Rowan-Smith.
They opened a couple of weeks ago, selling a mixture of coffee, cakes, drinks and salads for customers wanting to browse the shelves.
It's a literary kind of bookshop with Andre Gide, J Fennimore Cooper and George Eliot on the shelves rather than bodice rippers and bonkbusters.
"The bookshop and cafe is something we think is a natural combination which you don't very often see, at least in Sheffield. It's more a European and American idea. I've just come back from New York and there were all kinds over there," he says.
The food is homemade, including the soda baread, and cooking duties are shared between them.
The Rude Shipyard's speciality is a chocolate and Guinness cake. "I got the recipe from my dad and I think he stole it from someone else," adds Pete.
He's a former postman and Sally graduated last year in anthropology and Spanish and spent the following time planning the Shipyard.
The Spanish daily El Pais is on the newsracks.
The menu changes daily. On the board last week was rainbow salad – roast squash, tomato, chestnut mushrooms, spinach and toasted pumpkin seeds – and a pear, fennel, Wensleydale and walnut salad, both under a fiver.
The accent is veggie but not totally. They do a Sunday breakfast fry-up.
Abbeydale Road is getting a reputation for quirky cafes with the Italian Bragazzi's deli, West Indian Yabba and a Persian cafe all within a few hundred yards.
The Shipyard's customers range from local residents in their twenties to middle aged browsers from nearby Nether Edge. If they're musical, all the better, because besides bookshelves (more rooms are opening soon), chairs and tables and a sofa, there is a piano, guitar, banjo and other instruments to pick up and play.
- 89 Abbeydale Road. Open all week until late (closed Wednesdays).
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Friday 10 February 2012
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