A new café on North Road in Durham, 3 of Cups, opened earlier this year, offering a mix of homemade food, tarot readings, and community events in a setting that reflects growing interest in alternative and wellness-focused spaces.
00:00Tucked away on North Road here in Durham, this cosy little cafe is serving up more than just coffee and cake.
00:07Three of Cups brings together food, friendship and a touch of the mystical.
00:11Behind the counter and the tarot table are local fisters Lindsay and Bernie.
00:15One's a bacon whiz and tarot reader and the other's business savvy with a flair for community building.
00:21Together they've created a space that feels more like a warm hug than a haunted house.
00:24So Three of Cups is a welcoming and inclusive cafe in the heart of Durham City Centre and my sister and I created the cafe to be kind of like a welcoming space for everyone.
00:36Somewhere where people can come, get some homemade food and just really like relax and come together as part of like a community really.
00:45So my sister Bernie, she's like always wanted to open a cafe.
00:49It's been like her lifelong dream and I got really into spirituality and trained as a crystal healer and started doing like astrology and tarot readings and kind of selling those on Etsy.
01:02And then after like one, one day Bernie was like, oh, what should I do next?
01:05What am I going to like put my efforts into?
01:07And I was like, oh, you should open a cafe and I could read tarot there.
01:10And then it just kind of like snowballed.
01:12And now here we are.
01:14But with spooky season in full swing, Three of Cups is the kind of place that leans into the magic, not the mayhem of Halloween.
01:21So when we were chatting about the name, we really wanted to name the cafe after a tarot card.
01:26And the Three of Cups, we felt like just summed up everything we wanted the cafe to be.
01:30So the Three of Cups is a card that's all about community and coming together and like your people who just get you kind of celebrate all the different things that like make us unique and special, but really like coming together to enjoy and celebrate like life as well.
01:47So we felt like that was the perfect vibe for the cafe because we wanted people to be able to like come here on their own, meet new friends.
01:55Like we wanted to get to know all the customers and just really have that like community vibe where everyone is welcome.
02:00And it's like a safe space as well.
02:03My eldest child is neurodivergent and part of the LGBT community.
02:09So he's been a real integral part of making sure we've got things in the cafe that are suitable
02:16and welcoming.
02:17He's been a real big help in kind of giving us little hints and tips on little things that we can do to make it more comfortable.
02:24We all wear pronoun badges on our aprons.
02:27We've got pride flags throughout the cafe just to show that we are welcoming to anybody and everybody.
02:35We've trained our staff when they're taking orders or when they're welcoming people into the cafe to kind of just work with people's needs.
02:42If people need a little bit more time to order, whether that be to read the menu to them,
02:48to have people just point to what they want rather than speak it out loud.
02:52You know, just little things that we can do to make customers feel really comfortable.
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