“I was working away from Mudgee for about 26 months but when the place came up, it felt like the perfect time,” she said. “It’s something I’d always wanted to do.”

The café is a family effort, with Gyan’s mother Maria her co-owner, and her sisters Hannah and Nareeda on the staff.

“By combining our strengths, we actually balanced out,” Maria said. “If we didn’t have the drive, or the same idea of where we wanted the business to go, we wouldn’t have done it.”

Separating home and business may be hard for some, but Gyan and Maria agree that they’ve found the balance they need to make it work.

“We leave work at work,” Gyan said.

“If you’d have asked me three years ago if I could’ve worked with my family I’d have said ‘no way!’, but they put in the extra yards. It couldn’t have happened without them.

“Everyone chipped in in the mornings and afternoons and on the weekends because they all still had their own jobs to go to.”

“Nareeda actually suggested the name for the café as a joke because no one could agree on anything,” Gyan says, “And she used to help out in the morning and then say she’s going to her ‘real job’.”

In fact input came from almost anyone; Gyan and Maria said family and friends would call up and offer their advice, throw in new ideas and warn of the risks that could come with starting their own business.

The Endacotts said not one detail was overlooked or put in place without thought; every piece in the café has a story behind it.

“Gyan really wanted to have a plain wooden door for the front so I spent five days stripping the paint off it and sanding it back,” Maria said. “And with every layer of paint I got off I remembered what shop had been here before us. Like ‘this colour was another café, and another colour was for the one before that’, like stripping away history.”

Most of the furniture in the café has been given new life in the same way the front door has.

“The front counter was a science bench that we stripped the paint from, the shelf of jams and coffees was an old ladder that dad made the shelves for,” Gyan said. “And the book shelf was actually an old door! We owned most of what’s in here already.”

The inclusion of a bookshelf has proved to be a focal point of the café.

“We’ve had customers come in one day, take a book off the shelf, read a chapter, put a bookmark in and come in the next day to keep reading that same book,” Maria said. “We love that people feel comfortable enough to do that, it’s what we wanted.”

That level of dedication to their vision comes across in the menu as much as it does in the furnishings, with the coffee of course being the building block of that side of the business - the finding of which was no mean feat.

“I actually forgot the name of the café in Melbourne where I found the coffee,” Gyan said, explaining that she relied on Google Earth to virtually retrace her steps to find it.

“I was Googling and in Melbourne there are so many alleyways, it took me ages, but eventually I found an alley and thought ‘wait, this seems familiar.’”

And the online search was well worth it, with the café now stocking a boutique coffee only available in three other places in all of New South Wales.

“We knew exactly what we wanted and to have the café in Melbourne allow us to use their product was a huge confidence boost,” Gyan said.

Locals have taken to the café with enthusiasm to rival the Endacotts’ and love the food and atmosphere as much as the service. 

“We thought the hard part would be opening the door, but it turns out that was the easy part,” Gyan said. “Now we just have to keep it up!”

The Quick Brown Fox is open Monday - Friday from 7:30am - 4:30pm and Saturday from 7:30am - 2:30pm.