things we like

stuff around moo

We’re both from opposite parts of the world (Nigel is from the Wirral and his wife Kay is from Tokyo); no wonder we have such eclectic taste. Here are some stories about the stuff around moo.

moo micro farm
The moo micro farm displayed by the back window of the cafe is Nigel’s creation. Britains farm models were a big part of Nigel’s childhood. A disused fishtank inherited from the previous occupiers of our premises was just what Nigel needed to realise his lifelong ambition to produce a multi-tier model farm.

Vintage manga display
Kay grew up with a strong dose of Japanese manga and anime. Her earliest memory is watching Astro Boy on a black and white telly with her mum.

Astro Boy is the creation of Osamu Tezuka, the granddaddy of manga and was originally titled Tetsuwan Atomu (The Mighty Atom). In Kay’s view the recent Hollywood remake is a blandified version of the original. The picture gallery downstairs at moo displays pages from an old calendar illustrated with blowups of book covers of vintage manga by Tezuka.

The lightbox and Apple Macintosh Classic
A lightbox was left in our building when we moved in. It was hanging in the front window for displaying takeaway menus. We weren’t going to need it for that so we converted it into a surrogate window. The space downstairs where the lightbox sits used to be a window looking onto the nice garden at the back until it was boarded up for security reasons some years ago. So we resurrected the ‘view’ by using the lightbox as a window.

We had the Mac Classic at home. We brought it to moo when we hosted an iPad launch evening for our friends from Edinburgh Coffee Morning as an ironic prop and it stayed.

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food and drink

Links
Here are some of our favourite food and drink links.

Bei & Nannini – supplier of our real Italian coffee

Mighty Leaf Tea – supplier of our artisan teas

Fentimans – botanically brewed beverages in our fridge

Craigie’s Farm Jam Kitchen – supplier of our delicious jam made in small batches at Craigie’s Farm near Dalmeny

HJ Errington & Co – supplier of our blue cheeses

Great Glen Game – Scottish smoked wild game from the heart of the highlands

Isle of Skye Smokehouse – smoked seafood using traditional and sustainable methods

Summer Harvest – cold pressed rapeseed oil from Perthshire, a delicious alternative to olive oil

Gordon and Durward – traditional Scottish sweeties

Pat’s Chung Ying – Chinese supermarket in Edinburgh that stocks ingredients for pretty much all Asian cuisine

Maroque – an online shop that sells hard to get Moroccan spices

Japan Centre – probably the most comprehensive online Japanese food shop in the UK

Butch Bakery – only in New York

Retro cook books
We’re inspired by retro cook books. Not that we serve up bad ’70s food at moo cafeteria. We just like the look of cook books from the ’60s and ’70s and the kind of make do charm they exude from the days before supermarkets sold avocados, let alone frozen edamame. What really inspires us is the down to earthness of the approach to cooking from those days and we try to bring that to our cooking at moo.

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music

We love our music and we carefully compile moomix, our background music playlist. It’s regularly edited and updated. An approximation of the moomix playlist is available on Spotify. Here are some music links we regularly go to for ideas.