Best little cup of coffee in Geneva

It’s an entrepreneurs’ week, starting with the best little new coffee place in town – Geneva, that is – Boréal Coffee, in the financial district. Long live healthy competition! There’s finally a good Anglo-saxon-style independent alternative to Starbucks where you can get a great cup of coffee, have a sandwich or a salad and run back to the office with them or sit down and relax in a comfortable, tasteful setting. It just opened at 60, rue du Stand and my own experience is that it’s perfect for quick lunch meetings or slow novel reads, depending on your day.

The owners are two young men, Julian Caron Lys and Fabien Decroux, who met when they both worked as IT managers for Cross Systems, a large IT company in Geneva. The two caught the entrepreneurial bug and worked on one startup for a fruit smoothies company in central Europe, but they were short of financing and language problems got in the way, so they abandoned the venture.

Decroux headed for Australia, where he spent two years, and he fell in love with the coffee culture and the excellent coffee that comes in so many varieties. “Everything is an excuse to have coffee!”

Back in Switzerland he and Caron Lys decided in early 2008 that Geneva needed the Australian coffee touch. They spent several months learning the business, learning about barista coffees, touring coffee shops in the UK, Germany and elsewhere in Europe to get a good sense of what works and what doesn’t.

It took another few months to find the right location, knock out walls, and get set up, but they are definitely on the right track.

Webster offers entrepreneurship workshop 24 June

Webster University’s Hub for entrepreneurs is offering a workshop with contest for people who want to start their own businesses, 24 June. You need to present your idea to the public, which will discuss it under the leadership of a panel of judges and the winners that evening will be given mentors for their projects. Details

View of Geneva’s jet d’eau on a weathery day in July 2007 (see a series of weather-changing shots taken from the Kempinski terrace in the space of an hour)

The first time I set foot in the Noga Hilton was in 1985. It was cold and gray: November is not Geneva’s best month. I was part of the Time magazine crew sent to cover the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, the meeting that was the beginning of the end of the Cold War. My job was not very exciting for a journalist, but I was told it was essential. I had to guard the table in the Noga Hilton restaurant that gave our photographers the best view in the city of the jet d’eau. The big American television networks had claimed the rooftop area. Between bouts of holding down the table I wrote about Nancy Reagan’s visit for People magazine and walked around Versoix, where some of the meetings were held, looking for local color to add to the Time files we sent to Paris and New York. The Noga Hilton remains linked in my mind to the wallpaper of history’s great journalism stories.

More recently, my impressions of the hotel have been that the hotel’s charm was fading to the point of being almost but not quite funky.

Last week I interviewed the new general manager, with the hotel now under the Kempinski label and a makeover nearly completed. I decided to piggyback the appointment with a late afternoon meeting with another businesswoman. The meeting with the manager was moved up and the second meeting moved back, so I suddenly found myself with one of those unplanned three hours in the middle of the day, too short to go anywhere useful, too long to fritter away. The weather kept changing.

I decided to become one of the new Kempinski’s local customers, sitting down to work in the lounge.  Here’s my verdict:

During the afternoon I was able to find a quiet, well-lit corner of the large lounge area where I could plug in my laptop and work, using the wifi network, which worked fine. The lounge was comfortably busy, a good backdrop for work because the noise level never bothered me. I could see plants in the courtyard and trees and a bit of the lake when I looked up. A good work space. The staff was pleasant and helpful.

It was mid-afternoon, an odd time for a meal, so I ordered a sandwich. I loved my club sandwich, which is something I never order except in hotels, and the French fries were excellent. My favourite touch was the mini Tabasco sauce bottle, cheerful on a wet day. These are the small, stolen pleasures during a work day that make life a bit more fun.

Then I went downstairs to meet my evening appointment at the reception. She was late so I opened my laptop – and failed to get the wifi back. Three people at the reception didn’t know what the problem might be, so I decided it was time to stop working online. My friend arrived and we headed upstairs to the bar. She said someone else had told her the new decor is cold, whereas I had found the lounge just the opposite. But the evening was early, the somewhat empty bar a bit stark and we decided to have drinks outside.

The terrace area is delightful, a mix of wood and aluminum that works. The view of the city is great. She had a glass of wine for SFr6, which is pretty good in the centre of Geneva, and I splurged on a more expensive Pouilly Fuissé, pleased that you can order it by the glass. We sat and watched several weather patterns in the space of a few minutes and continued to sit under our large white umbrella despite a ring of water on the floor outside our table. We agreed there were two negatives, some confusion on the part of the waiter, who seemed to be a trainee and did not know much about wine, and the birds. The waiter will presumably get more training. The bold pigeons and sparrows will need more than training and I will be interested to see what miracles Kempinski can perform to get them to leave guests alone.

The hotel needs a little more time to warm up and iron out small problems, but even with that proviso, I’ll be making more appointments to meet people there. It has parking, is just before the worst of the perpetual city centre traffic jam,  and I like the feel of the place. There’s also always that magic, endlessly changing view of the city’s waterspout.

Note: Hats off! has just moved to GenevaLunch and if you’ve been one of the regular readers at the Tribune de Geneva, welcome back. Hats off! is a blog I wrote from June 2006 to May 2007 for the Tribune as its only English-language journalist blogger. It is now moving to GenevaLunch to keep the editor’s life (mine) a little simpler, with my blogs in one place, using just one blogging platform (software). It’s written for all of you (us) who wear too many hats in life, or as I wrote last June, "Hats, in the metaphorical sense, are something most people I know have
too many of, and they spend a good deal of their lives trying to
balance them."  Balancing your hats: I take mine off to you for trying.

ON AVS: The first old-new blog post is for anyone who is a little fuzzy on AVS (Swiss social security) rules, which means anyone who employs people or who works but is not a fulltime employee of a company. You don’t have to be a company to be an employer: do you hire someone to clean your house? 

This is a busy time of year for my small company, with contracts to be signed before people disappear on vacation, car insurance and life insurance policies to be reviewed, summer schedules to sort out. The phone call from the AVS office saying I was due for an audit was not welcome news, even less welcome when the man said to set aside at least half a day. In Vaud, companies are audited every 4-5 years, he said. When he arrived he said that companies with at least three employees are more likely to be audited than those with just one or two people.

Happily it took less than two hours because my company’s books are in good shape; for once I am grateful for the money spent on an accountant. I learned a few things that you should know if you own a company or if you work as a consultant or freelance person. Here they are:

1. Every company, NGO and non-profit organization based in Switzerland is liable for AVS payments to Swiss residents who work for them, whether as salaried employees or freelance workers: this money must be deducted from payments.
2. Every person in Switzerland who hires a person resident in Switzerland is liable for AVS, whether the work is mowing the lawn or cleaning the house or putting your books in order.
3. The exception is work done by freelancers who have registered as such with their AVS office or if they live in France with the French social security system. The office will provide an attestation if asked, which is a letter certifying that this person pays his or her own AVS. Freelancers might choose to do this because of tax benefits as a self-employed person or because you can set aside a larger sum of money in a retirement fund that is not taxed until you touch it.
4. When a company uses a freelance person it should ask to see a copy of a recent AVS attestation. If it does not and the freelancer is in fact not registered, the company is liable later for back payments to cover the AVS. Worse, the company may be considered to have been this person’s employer, in which case unemployment insurance and other social charges will be billed, as well as interest for late payments.
5. To avoid these problems and to be sure everyone is clear about who is paying the AVS a letter should state clearly that a) the person undertaking the work is registered with the AVS office as an indépendant and will pay the AVS or b) the company will pay the AVS.
6. The line between freelance and salaried employee is arbitrary. It depends on how long and regularly the person has worked for you and the amount of money paid. The freelancer whose AVS you are not paying today may well be considered your employee by the AVS office in three years, at which point you the employer will have to pay all social charges, possibly for past work as well as future. Review the situation together regularly with anyone who works for you – or anyone you work for – on a recurring basis.
7. AVS and social charges come to about 15% of the salary or fees paid, so anyone who plans not to declare income – we’ll skip over the moral issues here – should keep in mind that they will have to settle for at least 15% less because the employer is running a potentially expensive risk and does not have the option of deducting the charges from the company’s books. Should the person be paid 15% more? Use the same logic you use for taxes: do we all get paid more because we’re expected to pay taxes after income? If you live in a country with a crazy super-high tax rate, employers sometimes try to soften the cushion, but this is not the case in Switzerland.
8. Do the tax people and AVS people talk to each other? Neither will give a clear answer to this, in my experience, but a tax audit or questions raised by irregular situations can lead to an AVS  audit. After my own routine audit this morning I spoke with one experienced manager who outsources work frequently. "We are so careful about everything now, every little bill for SFr50 because it is really a pain if once in a while you don’t bother to deduct it or you don’t ask people for their papers." Or make sure the papers are still valid.

A final thought: women, especially those who clean house, too often balk at AVS deductions, perhaps because they don’t want to declare and therefore pay taxes on the income, but often because they don’t understand that this is their state pension fund. No matter where they come from and what country they plan to retire in, they are usually better off the day they retire if they have a fund of their own and not just their husband’s.