I baked the scones myself for six weeks. I was too tired to overthink them.
Mara Ellison opened Grove Blend Field in March 2019 in a converted Victorian ironmonger's shop. The original wooden shelving is still on the back wall, now holding bags of whole beans and a small collection of brewing equipment. The name came from the three things she wanted the café to feel like: a grove (somewhere you could sit under and breathe), a blend (the idea that coffee is always a conversation between origin and process), and a field (open, unhurried, a bit wild at the edges). It took her two years of saving and one failed lease negotiation before she found this building.
The first year was harder than expected. The espresso machine broke down in week three. The first baker left after four months. Mara baked the scones herself for six weeks, getting up at 4:30 a.m. Before opening at 8. She still talks about those scones as the best she has ever made, mostly because she was too tired to overthink them. Jonah joined in autumn 2019 and has been baking here ever since. The menu settled into its current shape by early 2020, just before the world changed and the café had to close for the first time.
Mara Ellison spent six years behind the bar at Fielding & Co., a small specialty café in Edinburgh, before moving south to open Grove Blend Field in 2019. She trained in green coffee sourcing with a cooperative in Oromia, Ethiopia, and spent three months working alongside a roaster in Copenhagen learning filter profiles. Her approach to the menu is methodical: she cups every new lot before it goes on the bar, and she keeps the cake selection deliberately short so nothing sits longer than two days. On quiet Tuesday mornings she roasts to Joni Mitchell records. She lives five minutes from the café with a very opinionated tabby cat named Biscuit.