The lanes and alleys around Taipei’s Zhongshan MRT station are the first stop for many aspiring young Taiwanese entrepreneurs, becoming home to hair salons, clothing stores, design studios, and café after café.

However, as these back streets are also in close proximity to various fast-food restaurants and department-store food courts, the competition has led to many of these stores closing down as quickly as they start up, unable to really stand out and make a name for themselves. Only Melange Café has stood the test of time, as popular now as it was when started 16 years ago.

 

At 7:30 in the morning, a surprising number of people line an alley in this neighborhood of residential homes and retail businesses, waiting to get their morning coffee and breakfast from Melange Café and start their day off right. And it was with this kind of people that the story of Melange and its founder, Chen Jui-jung, started.

Originally from Yunlin, Chen came to Taipei having apprenticed in the restaurant business for just NT$5000 a month. Once he had completed his military service, he started working for a coffee retailer, marking the start of a career in the coffee world.

Unlike working for a big company, where all the systems are in place and fixed, working for a small company meant that Chen often had to take on three people’s worth of work, doing everything from selling coffee beans and coffee machines to blending coffee beans.

At just 27 years of age, he decided to take the leap from a nice stable job into being an entrepreneur, aiming to share his brews with appreciative customers. He chose to do so in a small alley near the Zhongshan MRT station, naming his café Melange, from the French for “mixture,” after the combination of coffee and milk he offered his customers.

So what is Chen’s ideal café?

Remembering his experiences visiting Europe and Japan with his wife, Chen recalls the feeling of tiredness from trekking around destinations and how he would duck into cafés to get some relief in the form of a cup of coffee. Combining the aesthetics of Europe with the professionalism of Japan, in 1997 Melange Café was born just 30 paces from a McDonald’s.

 

Roasting beans and greeting regular customers, Chen says he sells coffee just to make a living, but even so, he has never rested in his determination to provide the best cup of coffee he can.

Before going into business, he would brew his coffee a cup at a time, but running the café has required him to move up to brewing upward of 100 cups a day, and the biggest challenge has been keeping those brews at the same high standard.

“In the past when I was working in the wholesale end of the business, all we were concerned about was the bottom line, but at a café, it’s all about technique,” says Chen. Every day, he and his wife tested their brewing and the results, and over the years, they built a reputation for their small café. Word of mouth soon saw people lining up to get into a café that could barely seat 30.

By 2002 the area had begun to flourish thanks to the Taipei Metro’s Tamsui Line and the growing number of department stores, and Melange experienced a sudden burst of popularity, with queues getting longer and its fame growing. In 2002 it moved to its current location, and the elegant interior, crisply dressed staff, and famed pairing of coffee and strawberry-topped waffles quickly saw the café become a must-visit for tourists from Japan and South Korea as well.

Eight years later, Chen rented another storefront just a few steps away down the same alley, opening a second branch.

However, while most storeowners would be overjoyed to see crowds of people queuing up outside, smiles on faces and cash in hand, Chen Jui-jung started to worry there were just too many of them.

He began to feel concerned that the quality of his coffee wouldn’t be able to stay as high with so many customers to worry about, and that people would end up having to wait too long for service. With so much business, he was afraid that Melange wouldn’t be able to live up to the ideal he had when he had started it. But rather than let this put him off, instead Chen redoubled his efforts to keep quality high.

Today he runs three branches, and Chen is as busy as ever, working long hours and coming in every day in his black shirt and brown apron to roast all the beans the cafés need from the small-quantity, high-quality selection he sets aside for his most loyal regulars.

Chen Jui-jung, owner of Melange Café, is as passionate about coffee as when he started the business, roasting his own beans and making sure every cup tastes great.

Standing behind a glass panel, Chen spoons coffee beans into his NT$700,000 imported German coffee roaster, checking on their color and scent, all the while keeping one eye on the store.

After starting with just a handful of staff, Chen now employs dozens of people, and he spares no expense in making sure they’re all capable coffee brewers. He provides his staff with nigh-unlimited coffee beans, encouraging them to brew, drink, and experience as much coffee as they can, and only after two months of training are new staff allowed to get behind the counter and actually serve customers.

Even well-established, historic businesses can eventually lose customers not because of changes in flavor or ingredients, says Chen, but because the founders lose their passion for the food and drink they once loved. Many new stores, too, lose business as they experience a boom in popularity and lose the human touch in a desperate grab at commercialization.

That doesn’t mean that Melange hasn’t had to make its own compromises. When it was opened, coffee culture in Taiwan was still in its infancy, so simply selling coffee wasn’t a workable idea. Many people would walk in, find out there was no food for sale, and walk back out, and so Melange expanded their menu to include full meals as well as snacks.

While this move helped shore up business, Chen began to have second thoughts upon seeing so many people come in just to eat, and decided to scale back to just snacks, hoping to get Melange back to its core as a coffee shop.

This dedication to coffee has been a constant throughout Chen’s time with Melange, aptly demonstrated in his uncompromising approach to quality.

As Chen’s Zhongshan locations grew in popularity, well-known department stores like Sogo and Shin Kong Mitsukoshi began inviting him to open up branches in their stores. But rather than rapidly expanding the business to a point where handling staffing and management could get too much, Chen has remained determined to keep things small.

With a shy smile, Chen remarks that if they expanded just for the sake of showing off how big they’d gotten and began changing their product, they’d quickly lose customers. Instead, he has taken a more cautious approach to growing the business, only opening a new branch in Xinyi District’s Shin Kong Mitsukoshi just this August after nine months of planning.

Throughout the growth of his business, Chen has remained uncompromising in his determination not to let product quality suffer in the name of an excessive focus on service.

While many businesses in Taiwan loudly proclaim that they “put the customer first,” Chen begs to differ. For example, Chen says, when a customer gets impatient and starts taking it out on the staff, he feels bad for the staff because it’s not their fault there are no seats free!

It is Chen’s position that service is fundamental to the food and beverage industry, but that we shouldn’t mistake the foundation for the firmament just to pander to customers. “You can’t treat staff like slaves, nor forget to provide a good product.”

“Would you rather have something delicious to eat, or have something that’s barely palatable but presented well? Your customers will soon let you know the answer to that!”

Having made a career in the world of coffee, Chen says that too many people get into the café business because they like drinking coffee and they think it’ll be cool, but when it comes time to get down to business, they quickly find out that things aren’t as romantic as they’d thought.

Chen admits that he, too, was once similarly overwhelmed by the romance. Sixteen years ago, when he started, it cost about NT$800,000 to start the average cafe, but he spent three times that buying the best equipment and making his store as beautiful as he could out of a desire to provide the best he could.

When Chen’s first branch relocated to its current location in 2002, he invested NT$10 million into décor and design alone; in 2010, when he opened a second branch in the same neighborhood, he spent NT$700,000 on a roaster and NT$5 million on imported waffle makers, slushee machines and the like for behind the counter. “Running a business, you’ve got to keep a keen eye on the expenses, but not too keen an eye, or you’ll want to throw in the towel.”

When the price of food began to rise in recent years, buying fruit cut his profit margins in half, but Chen stood firm, since business was good enough to cover the expense while still not raising prices. Even now, some 80% of the menu at Melange is unchanged from its early days, and the strawberry-topped waffles—long a favorite—have only risen in price by NT$20 from their original NT$130.

Looking back on his entrepreneurial journey, Chen recalls what it was like to go into the business simply from a love of coffee, yet he also wants to remind aspiring café owners that it takes more than just dreams to succeed. But with that said, you also shouldn’t forget your dreams, because they are what fuels the fires and will keep you pushing forward.

Chen Jui-jung, now 45, has relied on a natural pragmatism to temper his romanticism, and this philosophy has helped keep Melange and its alley home packed with customers for 16 years and counting.