Coffee Atelier

Coffee Atelier occupies a row of five interlinked shophouses built in 1927 on Lorong Stewart, in the UNESCO-listed core of George Town. One of the five, No. 53, was originally a coffee merchant's workshop — the Kim Guan Coffee Factory — and its wood-fired roasting equipment is still in place at the back of the building, kept as the anchor of what the site now calls the Kopi Museum. The rest of the compound has been restored into a small hotel (loft-style upper suites and ground-floor rooms, each roughly 50 square metres), the Gehrig Art Gallery showing Malaysian artists, and a restaurant, Christoph's, run by its Austrian namesake proprietor. It is an unusual combination for a coffee stop: a working museum piece rather than a themed display, set inside a building whose Straits eclectic architecture is itself part of Penang's heritage-tourism draw. Visitors who stop for a cup are, in effect, standing in the actual former processing room of a Penang coffee trade concern, with the equipment that once roasted for it still standing rather than reproduced. The address — 47-55 Lorong Stewart — puts it within walking distance of George Town's temple and church cluster, making it as much a heritage stop as a coffee one.