In conversation with Reka Gawa, the café’s owner
What is a café? Is it simply a small restaurant selling hot drinks and little bites to accompany them? Google searches would certainly make you believe so. They are places for commerce, a change of scenery from the office or the library, and a supplier of bitter bean juice to maximise your productivity. When walking around central Edinburgh, this description seems accurate, especially with the likes of Costa, Nero, and Starbucks taking over street corners. The sight is a familiar one, with students and young professionals lining the windows, typing away on their laptops, and taking advantage of the free wifi that came with their £6 coffee.
This concept of the café is comically reflective of the values that our society treasures: profit, productivity, and performance. The café is more than that however, and their corporate reinvention is merely a bastardisation of what was, historically, a social space meant for sharing ideas, emotions, and empathy over a stimulating drink. To students, cafés play important roles in our social lives, but they also have a real impact on the wider communities they serve.
For those who venture beyond the corporate café, Edinburgh has many independent cafés to offer. One of these is the Himalaya Tibetan Café, situated on South Clerk Street in Newington. Behind the Himalaya’s yellow facade, prayer-flag lined windows, and spiritual charm lies a heartwarming story of compassion, chai, and community, which its owner Reka Gawa shared with The Student. She believes that what separates the Himalaya from its counterparts is that she treats it as “more of a community hub than a cafe.”
The Himalaya’s atmosphere is unlike any conventional café, which becomes immediately apparent to first-time visitors. For one, the warm, Tibetan-Buddhist interior doesn’t merely serve as decor. Visitors are encouraged to try out the various singing bowls, use the meditation room downstairs, and ask about the meaning of the prayer flags lining the walls. Reka wants the Himalaya to feel as much like a living room as it is a café, and it’s not uncommon to see people washing their dishes in the back or making their own coffee behind the counter, and it’s what she appreciates most about the café: “I never think of coming here as going to work because the community is so close and I am always around so many lovely people.”
Indeed, while in conversation with The Student, one of the cafe’s regulars came in with three generations worth of family to celebrate her grandfather’s birthday. Naturally, café chef Auntie already knew what foods to prepare for the festivities. At the same time, regular visitor Scott didn’t hesitate to chime into the conversation. He is a disabled senior and has been walking to the Himalaya every morning for around five years, and Reka assured that he always comes to the café for his daily chai and yap.
Reka’s philosophy of running the Himalaya stems from her childhood. She grew up as a Buddhist, with her father being a devoted monk who fled the 1959 Tibetan uprising and China’s consequent consolidation of power in the area. While she later went to school in Denmark and decided to move to Edinburgh in her 20s, she told The Student that she always held on to her Tibetan-Buddhist values of compassion, empathy, and integrity while running the café .
She considers the Himalaya to be her personal mission, which she traces back to her encounter with the Dalai Lama while working as catering staff at the Scottish Parliament in 2004. His Holiness, as she calls the Tibetan-Buddhist spiritual leader, told her to “spread Tibetan culture and values to the people of Edinburgh,” adding that “after coming home that night, I could not stop thinking about how I could fulfil my new mission” until she finally made the split decision to use her savings, quit her job, and open the Himalaya without much of a plan in 2007.
Relying on the kindness of her first customers in renovating the derelict commercial unit on South Clerk Street while also “scraping together rent from every source [she] could find for the first few months,” the Himalaya has been in symbiosis with its community from the very beginning. After years of running the café successfully however, Reka was faced with a dilemma: her landlord wanted to sell the property meaning that the future of the café was endangered. She set up a GoFundMe to bridge the funds she couldn’t secure through savings and a mortgage, but never thought it would be successful. After a BBC spotlight however, she was able to raise the £75,000 needed to buy out the unit for good:
“At the time I didn’t even consider that I made a difference to the people around me, not to mention that they would donate money. I was simply following His Holiness’ advice.”
Whether Reka’s success in building the Himalaya was due to the Dalai Lama’s blessings or rather her unique philosophy of treating a café as an authentic and people-first community hub remains up to belief. However, it is undeniable that the Himalaya succeeds in providing a welcoming social space that so many other cafes have left behind in the name of corporate profits, which clearly resonates among its customers.
Photo by Mark Chan for The Student