A little after lunch, all is quiet on Radu Beller. The businesspeople that had a cup of coffee in the morning or had lunch are already back at the office. Waiters are getting ready for the second wave of customers for the day: the afternoon bunch, who gave a relatively deprecatory meaning to the ”go out for a cup of coffee in Dorobanti” phrase. More concerned about showing off than about business or about the simple pleasure of sitting in an outdoor restaurant, this type of customer, as well as the overall increase in revenues over the last few years have been the most important causes for the development of coffee shop poles in Bucharest.

Radu Beller was the first such pole because it is precisely on this street in the Dorobanti quarter that the after-1990 history of coffee shops and restaurants in Bucharest began – once the Deutschland confectionery shop and the White Horse restaurant opened some time around 1997. ”I bought this house in 1995, when I came back from a trip to London and decided to get my own pub,” recalls Cristian Paun, the owner of White Horse and La Belle Époque restaurants, about the house in Dorobanti where he opened the first pub-restaurant in the capital. Coffee shops and restaurants started to develop on Dorobanti and Radu Beller since 1999, with the opening of Nova Brasilia and, some time later, of the High Heels or The Belle Époque.

In June 2009, ten years from the start of the development of the area, more than ten restaurants and coffee shops are lining the street. Quite a crowded street section, which however, attracts more than one million customers a year, who drink more than two million cups of coffee and generate more than ten million euros. It is very important that anyone opening a coffee shop and wanting to have it blend in with the area, should place it right there, in those several tens of metres. Around 2006, the area that had started to develop as a business meeting place began turning into a fashionable location.

”2006 was the year when a sort of small bourgeoisie started to develop in Romania, people who had made money from real estate speculations, from selling some property given back to them by the state, from various other small businesses, who immediately saw Dorobanti as an area that had shut them out until then, which they suddenly could afford. This is how they started to come,” says Cristian Paun explaining how the customers of the area changed. To real estate agents specialising in that location, the flood of customers was a significant leap of the market. Alexandru Preda, retail broker of Colliers, says that spaces in Radu Beller are rented as soon as they are put on the market. Too bad there are not too many of them: most of the existing spaces have been occupied by the same coffee shops for years. ”Almost no one has closed up shop on Dorobanti until now,” says Preda, who is carefully watching the area and says he has customers for each space that comes up.

Radu Beller, however, has become too small a place for all the people in Bucharest who wanted to go out for a cup of coffee. Especially since as soon as a street is known as a business pole, it starts to become fashionable, and the business pole tends to move, though somewhere close by. Which is why in 2003-2004, when Dorobanti became a crowded street, other areas started to develop. One by one, Dorobanti (from Piata Lahovari towards Perla), Episcopiei and Dinicu Golescu streets, the University area and then Decebal developed. All these streets together with Radu Beller generated almost 100 million euros in business in 2008, as calculated by BUSINESS Magazin.