A new slow bar is coming to Market Street in Westhoughton, promising locals a new way to enjoy coffee. The project is the brainchild of 37-year-old Chris Newton, a coffee roaster from Barnfield Drive who’s turning his passion for specialty coffee into a thriving small business called Wilbys.
Chris is working with Self café owner Nikki Gillon to transform an unused room into a combined roastery and slow bar. “Nikki said, ‘Oh, there’s a spare room that I’m not using. It’s basically a shell.’ I went in, and it still is to this day, but I was like, yeah, that’d be fantastic,” he says.
The idea isn’t to compete with Nikki’s café but to complement it. “Nikki will continue to sell milk-based drinks—lattes, americanos, that sort of thing,” Chris explains. “What I want to do is offer something a bit more specialty—like a V60 or a Chemex—where it takes 10 minutes to brew, not two.”
Chris says the slow bar is about sharing what he’s learned about coffee over the past few years. “I want to get people to have the reaction I did, going from instant Nescafé to, ‘Oh my word, I didn’t realise that coffee could taste like that.’”