As an espresso machine whirs and the smell of flowers fills the air, owners Gregory and Marta Wincenty-Cichy stand like a beacon in the dark for Liberties parents. Especially those who desperately crave a moment to sit down and enjoy a morning coffee and flower-adorned pastry, with their kids occupied by the neatly stacked books in a very unusual Dublin café kiddie corner.
Flower&Bean was a fresh start for both Greg and Marta, a couple who came to Dublin in 2012 from Poland. “After I closed down a café in Poland, the idea was to come in here for six months and make it up,” said Greg, thoughtfully focused on the warmth of his coffee shop around him, sitting with me at the table in the far corner.
“Dublin has something captivating. It’s a love-hate relationship. Like when you’re in Dublin, you hate it, but when you leave, you want to be back. Dublin hooked me in, and I stayed here,” he said.
Marta, who focuses on artisan baking and edible flowers, has baked since she was a little girl; in Poland, cooking and gathering around the table are central to family life, and that’s when her interest in baking with edible flowers began to grow. A big part of this passion was finding “something else” to use instead of regular store-bought decorative sugar sprinkles and fondant.
“My mom used to pick raspberries for us, and sometimes before that, she picked roses. So all the flavours kind of made sense, and these are my kind of memories of it,” Marta said.
“I am a master of history of art and cultural studies. So this all is connected. That’s what we do, all the flowers and being seasonal and pairing it together. So that’s why all of this looks a bit different,” she said as she pointed out the decorative flowers in test tubes, seasonal pumpkins and the entirely neutral, wood-toned, comfortable space of the coffee shop.
In Dublin, both Marta and Greg worked in the hospitality industry for 10 years before launching their business.
Greg has done “literally everything” in Dublin’s coffee industry, starting as a barista and completing a marketing course here. He competed in and won the 2015 Irish Aeropress Championship, then went to Seattle, USA, to represent all of Ireland at the World Championship.
“I was a coffee trainer, so I was training other young baristas how to make coffee. I was doing quality control. I was doing operations. I was doing sales. I was roasting coffee too,” he said, before going on to say that through this he realised that “serving coffee to a final customer is the best part”.
When it comes to the coffee they serve, he always wanted to pay homage to local coffee roasters while also giving people the experience of coffee from around the world. Greg recalls being most surprised when 3FE CEO Colin Harmon contacted him to sell his coffee, as that seemed unlikely for the famous Dublin roaster.
“So when I realised Colin was asking, ‘Do I want to serve his coffee?’ It was one of the biggest compliments I ever got in the coffee world because Colin was my idol,” he said.
For Marta, baking took the form of Cakebox in 2018, a home-bakery initiative that made celebratory cakes adorned with edible flowers. She read a lot to understand edible flowers, but when she started baking them here, there had not been “much knowledge on it”.
Marta learned through experience and conversations with industry insiders, visiting Irish farms like McCormack farms to gather flowers and use them in her recipes and cakes. “I check my favourite bakers to see what they bake. So yeah, usually it’s social media, and I check what’s going on in Poland, the UK and Copenhagen,” she said, expressing how tradition back from Poland is very important as well.
In 2022, four years ago, Marta and Greg first started up Flower&Bean on Cork Street. Marta shared the story as she sat opposite me at the café, with her daughters running around, saying, “One day, I think we went for dinner somewhere, and we’re like, wait, why are we working for somebody else?”
Greg has consulted for coffee shops before, helping business owners plan. “At some point, I went, why do we do that if we have the needed skills between the two of us?” he said.
Flower&Bean was built on community, and as a space for children and parents to find solace, something most third-wave, laptop-based coffee shops in Dublin don’t have. “On the first day, we saw loads of kids, and we just thought that, yeah, we need more kids because like there’s no kids’ place in Dublin,” Greg said.
“We wanted to be kid-friendly because we have kids ourselves. And as a young father, 10 years ago, I saw many places where I felt kind of out of place,” he added, looking to the small corner filled with books and toys. “The kids play for 10-15 minutes, and parents have time for coffee. And for parents, having a hot coffee is amazing.”
Marta chimes in when I spoke to her about this, adding, “I think our kids became our inspiration as well”.
To give back to the community, the cafe has expanded to hosting events, like silent book club and queer speed dating, providing a safe space. “The community will help you when you need help as well. But we’re here, we live here, and we know what that community might need: a third space,” said Greg.
Dublin, however, isn’t always easy to live in, and owning a business isn’t a walk in the park, both because of legislation and antisocial behaviour. “There’s loads of legislation. There’s all the food safety authority. There’s also hassle. There’s taxation,” Greg said. “So I’ve seen many people who failed here because they thought it’s like, oh, it’s easy peasy. It’s not”.
In 2025, Greg released CCTV footage of a man who tried to rob their coffee shop, and the Irish Independent ran a headline on it. “We had a robbery attempt, and the guy attacked me with a broken bottle. Thankfully I pushed him out,” he said. Marta nodded along to this. She has had her own experiences of antisocial behaviour around the business, which shows just how hard it sometimes is for small business owners in our city.
In 2026, Flower&Bean won the award for most sustainable cafe in Ireland and received McKenna’s Guide 2025 and 2026 plaques.
Both Greg and Marta are in tune with their community, and it shows through the meticulous care they put into their business. “This is how I like to see it: that we don’t sell coffee here; we sell the experience, and the happiness,” Greg said.
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