Cereal offenders: The Belfast brothers who opened that controversial cafe

Belfast brothers Gary and Alan Keery got a frosty reception when they opened a cereal cafe in London. Shilpa Gantra meets them and wonders why Rice Krispies become so divisive.

“WE had camel milk here last week. But it didn’t sell well, it was too salty,” says Gary Keery in his soft Belfast accent.

I eye up my salted caramel hot chocolate with suspicion.

We can only be in the Cereal Killer Cafe, Gary and his twin brother Alan’s famous eaterie, serving a combination of over 100 different types of cereals around the world, 20 toppings, and 30 milks including Jersey, skimmed, semi-skimmed, soya, rice, coconut, lacto-free, hazelnut and almond. And camel, for one week only.

Away from the fridges of milk and shelves of rainbow coloured cereal boxes, there’s everything your 11-year-old self wanted in life: Frosties reflectors, stickers, magnets, the toys you’d have to laboriously collect tokens for.

Tony the Tiger and the Honey Monster are omnipresent. Behind a wall of milk crates, the Camden branch even houses a row of single beds to eat Fruit Loops on — exactly the measure of my ambition at that young age.

“We’ve always said from the start that we were more than a bowl of cereal,” says Gary, speaking also for his twin, who’s slunk off to buy his Hallowe’en costume. “We sell nostalgia. We wanted to make it like a museum for cereal.”

It certainly caught the public’s imagination, earning a large amount of mixed press when opened in December 2014 and allowing them to expand from Shoreditch into Camden in May this year.

Keen to trade on their brand, their latest venture is a cereal cookbook. Yes, really.

Recipes include cornflake-battered chicken (though the twins themselves are vegetarian), unicorn poop (marshmallows, Ricicles, broken up party rings and hundreds and thousands), yellow monster rice cakes and lucky leprechaun cheesecake.

If the mood takes you, you can cut out masks of the twins, or stare at magic eye pictures until cross-eyed.

The problem is, as is well-publicised, many think a cereal cafe is already a joke gone too far, let alone a cereal cafe cookbook.

“I don’t think people are getting it,” says Gary, a tiny bit exasperated.

“There’s been a lot of bad publicity about it. We asked ourselves if this café was a book, what would that book be?

“We wanted to get that humour and nostalgia across. We’re not chefs.

“We’re not a Michelin experience here. So it’s like a 90s annual style.”

That’s the period the twins began their nurturing their talents as cereal connoisseurs in Belfast, the youngest kids in a working class family which also consists of their brother Neil, and parents Herbie and Kay.

Gary remembers cereal-buying as one of their first, and certainly most important, decisions they’d make.

“We used to get taken to Crazy Prices, which is like Tescos is now, and we were allowed one box of cereal every week. It was such a big decision, I remember wanting that flavour, but wanting another cereal because it had a toy in it.

“So when people come in and see the 200 cereal boxes on the wall, that’s the same decision we had to make.”

The twins might work and live together (they’re both single), but they didn’t always get on — they fought so much at school they had to be put in separate classes in year seven, which is ironically when their close bond was forged.

When Alan moved to Brighton in the noughties, Gary soon followed, and finally they both made their move to London in 2010.

The idea for the cereal cafe came about three years later, when both twins were out looking for something to feed their hangover — something liquidy but filling and comforting.

Spotting a gap in the market, they applied their retail and hospitality background to derive the concept of a cereal cafe.

While they don’t sell it, their venture is like Marmite: you love it or hate it. And the haters became apparent straight away.

The first significant attack was when Channel 4 ran a piece with the twins on their opening day, but blindsided them with a question on selling £2.80 bowls of cereal in one of the most poverty-stricken areas of the UK.

(The day after, their dad put forward a strong retort: “Why couldn’t they understand that we’re offering a sit-down meal for £2.80? Where is the poverty in that? You can’t get a sit-down meal in Brick Lane anywhere else for £2.80.”)

The second attack is the misinformation, with ‘£6 for a bowl of cereal? Are you mad?’ being a favourite opinion about the cafe.

“People are rounding up all the time. First it’s £3, then it was £5 and now it’s £6,” Gary responds.

“If you want to come in here and spend £6 on a bowl of Coco Pops, go ahead. But if you ask for that, our staff are trained to say, ‘are you sure? Why don’t you try this chocolate cereal from Israel?’

“If you’re pissed off because you think I sell a bowl of Coco Pops for six quid, you clearly haven’t been here.

“You don’t get it, and that’s fine.

“But don’t turn up to my door and start throwing paint bombs because you don’t get what I do.”

Which brings us on to the most recent and most extreme attack, by anti-gentrification protestors.

Seen as the epitome of hipster culture pricing out the local community, their shop was targeted during protests in September, with smoke bombs, paint and cereal thrown.

“We opened as usual the next day; it was mostly external damage,” Gary recounts.

“It took us a couple of days to get rid of the paint. The smoke that came into the shop landed on the porch inside, and it did do a bit of damage inside.

“But I’m from Belfast, we’ve seen mindless violence before. You don’t let it affect you.

“You just get on with what you’re supposed to do. I’m not going to let them bully me into closing my shop because they don’t like me selling a bowl of Coco Pops. I’m not asking them to pay for it.”

I try and tease out their contribution to a changing London, but it’s evident they’re uninterested in being a battleground for gentrification.

“I’m not the most educated person, I didn’t go to university, and people want to talk to me about gentrification!

“I just sell cereal. Don’t ask me about gentrification, ask my about what milk goes with Coco Pops.”

While there’s been no more physical violence, the string of abuse hasn’t stopped.

“We get death threats.

“We were getting so many phone calls, we had to bar all private numbers because they were literally non-stop. ‘Are you a hipster?’ ‘Are you that hipster café?’

“Yes, we’re the hipster café,” he says, rolling his eyes.

“We can’t get enough hipsters in our door.

“That label hipster is flying around so much, and the only people who use it do so in a derogatory way.

“It really annoys me. People think I’m a hipster because I’ve got a beard and I’ve got coloured hair [actually, he has a man bun too].

“You can call anybody a hipster these days.

“You ride a bike instead of getting the bus to work? You’re a hipster. People ride bikes to work all the time, big deal.”

But the detractors haven’t stopped the Cereal Killers making a financial killing too.

With two profit-making branches open in one year, they’ll announce their international expansion after Christmas, with franchises planned for Paris, Vancouver and Dubai, plus other cities planned for the following phase.

Which begs the question, can we expect to see a cereal cafe in Ireland?

“I’d love to open one in Ireland,” he replies enthusiastically. “I couldn’t personally because I live in London now, but I’d love if we had a franchise partner.

“I think Dublin would definitely work. I don’t know about Belfast.

“Is Belfast still a bit backwards? They can’t even accept gay marriage so how are they going to accept a cereal café?

“Dublin is all for gay marriage, so they’d be into a cereal café,” he laughs at the correlation, explaining: “It’s sort of accepting of the future.”

I suggest that Dublin might be an ideal place, given its idiosyncratic love of one-dish restaurants (Crackbird, Bunsen, Porndog).

The latest of these, I explain while trying to look mature tackling the tankard of hot chocolate, is Aungier Danger, which opened in October.

They’re just as famous for their doughnuts as they are for selling out of them by mid-morning.

Gary laughs when he hears that. “I don’t understand when people sell out of stuff. The crisp cafe in Belfast (the now-defunct Simply Crispy) did the same. “It’s like, why not plan for a busy day? Just make more! Make more than you did the day before, then you won’t sell out!”

Indeed, despite the marketable owners, retro decor and mini bottles in which to serve the milk, they’ll tell you that there’s a chasm between a culinary experience and a gimmick — and they’re firmly on the side of an experience.

Camel milk notwithstanding.