It’s no secret Windsorites like to pay it forward, and a new café in the city has put that option right on its menu.“There is a need for people to be kind to each other,” said Nancy Tessier, owner of Mashup Kaffe in Walkerville’s Windsor Business Networks hub.
Here, customers can order a caffe sospeso – which literally translates from Italian as “suspended coffee” – and leave it on the café’s tab for a person in need.
“All we need is someone to get it started, someone to see it,” Tessier said. “It doesn’t work if a community doesn’t get behind you.”
The tradition of the caffe sospeso is said to come from Naples, Italy, where someone who has a particularly lucky day orders two coffees at their local bar but receives only one, essentially paying one coffee forward in return for their good fortune. A person in need who visits the bar can then ask if there’s a sospeso available.
Tessier said she wanted to include the option in the café in the hopes of helping people develop more compassion.
It’s not uncommon to have customers walk in who can’t afford a full cup of tea or coffee, Tessier said. There’s the Windsor Youth Centre and Street Help/Unit 7 nearby.
Mashup’s caffe sospeso is a different spin on the pay-it-forward phenomena that happens periodically at some of Windsor’s busy drive-through coffee joints for events like Random Act of Kindness Day.
Employees at the Coffee Exchange in downtown Windsor said it happens occasionally that a customer pays it forward, though not in quite the same way as a caffe sospeso. A few months back, they said, a young man offered to pay for the coffees of three strangers behind him.
Customers at Mashup Kaffe, which is housed in the Windsor Business Networks hub, can order anything off the menu – coffee, tea or a specialty drink – and leave it on the café’s tab for someone in need.
According to Wikipedia, Naples launched an official caffe sospeso day in 2011, and according to the online magazine L’Altra Agrigento Online, the city of Lampedusa in Sicily did something similar to promote community involvement and support people in need.There’s even a non-profit organization in Italy called 1 Caffe working to bring back the tradition into Neapolitain bars and coffee shops.
Source:- blogs.windsorstar.com
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