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They don't open the cafe until early 2022.
The idea was planted in their heads way before that, though.
It came along with living in their hometown and dreaming of something bigger, something better.
It came with being brothers and picking up new skills and wanting to do whatever they did after high school together. The idea of owning some sort of business or shop spun from that principle, the one of wanting to do something bigger and better together.
Some of these fantasies included restaurants and arcades and corner stores, but the specifics didn't matter back then. It was all about building some unique environment from the ground up, about building something bigger than themselves to be shared between them and the rest of the world.
The coffee shop part was Nick's idea. Sort of.
When they're teenagers, he gets a job in a grocery store. That inevitably stops being interesting, so it doesn't last long. And after that came the barista position at their local Starbucks, which sucked in some ways and was fun in others.
Some customers were kind, and he'd make original drinks for himself and his brothers at the end of his shifts. He'd mix syrups and milks and different ingredients until he created things that didn't exist on the menu.
And sometimes, when everything was just right, it was easy to get lost in the routine of taking orders and making drinks and organizing ingredients during the short-lived lulls where he wasn't doing anything. When the music over the speakers strayed from the same handful of songs they always played, when things just fell into place, it was genuinely nice.
Everything he hated about the job came from it being such an established chain and not having control over certain elements. But the bare bones? The drinks and the orders and the kind regulars?
He could see himself falling in love with it. Especially if his brothers were doing it with him in some way. He doesn't think it'll ever happen, but the sentiment it there.
When they're sixteen, Nick is gifted lots of fancy coffee ingredients because of how much he liked making the various drinks. And the moment he has the machines and the syrups and the flavored creamer at home, he quits the job at Starbucks.
There's a whole section of counter space under their coffee cabinet dedicated to the set up, and jokes about Nick being a barista persist long after he's done with the job.
"I'll love you forever if you make me that caramel iced coffee again." Chris was sitting on the counter, watching Nick take the time to make himself a drink and insisting that he did the same for him.
"I'm your brother. You love me anyways." Nick wasn't having it. He pressed a button on the machine in front of him, leaving his mug there and opening a cabinet to grab another despite his words. Chris smiled, swinging his feet back and forth under him. "I'm not your personal barista, y'know."
"But you are a barista who's my brother. Which is like, the same thing." Chris argued.
"I quit my job at Starbucks forever ago. I just do this for funsies now." Nick told him. "I shouldn't do it for you for free so often. All the ingredients are right here, do it yourself."
"If I broke one of your beloved coffee machines you would actually murder me." he watched Nick fill the new mason jar glass with ice and grab at the bottle of caramel syrup, tilting the glass so that it coated the inside and swirling it in a satisfying motion that spread it over the ice cubes.
The way Nick knew the recipe off of the top of his head and worked through multiple drinks at once made him seem like a professional. Not just a kid who worked at Starbucks for a while, but someone who actually enjoyed doing it.
"That's true." Nick hummed, setting the glass on the counter. "You should pay me, though. Making coffee for everyone is like, a part-time job at this point. No one appreciates me enough."
Chris chuckled, "Here, lemme see..." he made a show of reaching into his pocket, coming up with three bottle tabs and a marble. "I didn't even know those were in there. Here you go."
Nick just stared at his outstretched hands, "I'm not accepting that as payment."
Chris shrugged, "It's all I got."
"If I owned a coffee shop, I'd kick you out so fast. Your photo would be behind the counter and I'd tell everyone in there to 'Never serve this kid!'" Nick shook his head. "I'd fire any worker who breaches it, too."
They laugh at the idea, and then they move on and have coffee together and Matt joins them once he rolls out of bed, requesting something with chocolate in it. The passing concept of owning a coffee shop is mentioned once and then they're onto the next thing like it's nothing at all.
But it's not nothing, because that idea would lead to everything.
--
When COVID hit and coffee recipe and morning routine videos were the only thing anyone talked about on TikTok, his brothers try to convince Nick to start posting some of his original drinks.
At best, they go viral. At worst, they have a record of Nick's long list of unique coffee beverages.
He doesn't do it until Chris decides to start baking all the sudden. Maybe it was the extra time or the boredom or just an attempt to build a new skill, but suddenly Chris was always mixing up some sort of batter and talking about brownies and buttercream frosting and pastries.
It's a sudden interest, but it goes with Nick's existing hobby well.
Nick's interest in coffee and tea and such only came about because he saw the job opening and thought that it might be better than working at the grocery store, and it seemed just about as sudden as Chris's newfound love of baking when it first happened. It was sudden, and then it stuck around.
And eventually, it faded from a passing hobby to a genuine skill. It was just something people expected from him. The hobby was like an identity marker, becoming part of who he was just because he was good at it.
This exact thing plays out for Chris with baking.
It's nice to not be the only one experimenting in the kitchen, to wake up and work alongside his brother on separate but aligned projects.
And there's a new thing, now, where Chris tried to make baked treats that went with Nick's drinks.
For every caramel iced coffee, there was a salted caramel brownie recipe.
With every strawberry-chocolate frappe came a pastry with strawberry jam and dark chocolate filling with powdered sugar sprinkled on top.
They'd work around each other in the kitchen and then serve the combinations to Matt and their parents and other friends. They'd take photos and they shared a notebook where they wrote down all the recipes, labelled 'super secret filed' but placed openly on their kitchen counter.
It's during the height of this that Nick and Chris make a tiktok account, thebaristaandthebaker, where they start posting a mixture of short vlogs, recipe tutorials, and reviews of their creations.
Their first video to get a million likes is the start of their most popular series, The Critic Reviews, where the brother uninvolved in the creation process would be served the food and give very serious reviews (read: not serious in the slightest) via video format.
Nick edited them to look like a high-stress baking show, intercutting with clips of Chris and Nick talking about their thought processes and others of them actually putting everything together. There were clips that went around TikTok without context, of them screaming and making jokes and ranting about unrelated things and loosing focus on the task at hand because they were brothers and that's what brothers did.
It was a nice way to fill their time, honestly.
"Have you seen the videos of people remaking our pumpkin spice recipes?"
The three brothers were in Nick's room, Chris sat in a chair scrolling through his phone while the other two were on his bed flipping through the recipe notebook.
"Yes! We're getting tagged in videos left and right. It's actually kind of insane." Nick replied, "People usually like our videos because they're funny but I don't think this many people have gone to try a recipe themselves before."
"Some people were complaining that they don't feel like making it themselves." Matt told them, "Said something about wishing they could pull up to a Starbucks and just buy it."
Chris hummed in thought like he had an idea, shifting in his position in his chair. "Y'know, when the world is open again, we could find a way to sell our stuff."
"Like, a stand or something?" Matt asked.
"Or a coffee shop." Nick realized, his eyes going slightly wide in excitement. "Like an actual cafe. We could have our own kitchen instead of making a mess in Mom's every day."
"There's also the whole 'making money off of it' thing." Chris pointed out, "I think we could do it if we tried. Like, actually tried."
"After we finish school." Matt amended, "But yeah. Maybe. If people are still interested by then."
That's where the idea stays for a while- in a mental box labeled 'for later' to be circled back to when the time came about. They talk about hypothetical names and menus and Matt goes a little insane about possible aesthetics and themes and interior design, but none of it is solid nor serious.
They liked the idea of owning a coffee shop, but they knew it'd have to wait if it happened at all. If people were still interested in them once they could act on the idea.
Until then, it was a dream. It was but a fantasy now fitted with details, a hypothetical future that might just work.
All they can do is wait.
--
They finish high school in 2021, and it's their graduation money and savings that eventually goes towards putting a down payment on an empty shop.
There isn't a lot of debate about it, because they loved what they did and they were doing it together and they wanted to do it forever.
And people weren't just interested in the idea of a coffee shop ran by them; They were excited.
It's a unique building, placed on the corner of a busy street with a tattoo shop next door and a plant nursery across the street. There's free parking lining the road just outside, and a tiny music store down the road.
It was the perfect location, honestly.
And the shop itself is amazing, too.
It used to be a bakery, with an apartment on the top floor and a cafe at the storefront. There was a large kitchen tucked beyond a metal door that swung open no matter which way you pushed on it behind the counter and the windows had seating nooks that they would stock with pillows and set up as booth seating.
They move into the apartment while redecorating the shop, which is where Matt takes over and the other two get to focus on creating the perfect menu.
They go through all their recipes and figure out ingredient prices and how much to upcharge and which ones people would like the best, but they knew it'd change overtime as they got customers and learned what sold.
They're on the first floor placing tables and chairs when Matt brings it up.
"I need to order a sign soon, or else people will think this is just a random shop. I figured we'd do one big one for outside of the building, and then a window decal as well? Maybe one of us could use glass markers and redesign it seasonally." he placed a tall stool at the counter, lining it up so that the ordering counter kind of looked like a bar.
Behind the counter, there was two large televisions mounted to the wall that would eventually house the digital menu, but they had yet to mock it up because they were still deciding on branding.
"That sounds good to me." Nick agreed easily, "We can do snowmen in the winter holding little drinks. It'll be cute."
"There is one thing, though." Matt pauses, looking between his brothers. "We need an actual name. The whole 'baker and barista' thing works as a TikTok username, but we need a serious cafe name so people who don't know us will be willing to stop in."
"A lot of people like the 'baker, barista, critic' trio thing. The whole triplet brand. We can spin off of that?" Chris suggested.
They were all on the same page about opening a coffee shop and managing their social media platforms being the post-high school plan, but the name of the cafe that had been hypothetical until recently had always been a snag in it all.
They could never figure out something that sounded just the right amount of serious and the perfect splash of funny, something that balanced potential new customers with their fans who would go out of their way to support the business.
They needed something unique but not crazy, something cute but interesting.
In the end, it's Matt that comes up with it. It's days after he originally brought up the sign that they're sorting through materials for the cafe in the living room of their apartment.
"What about 'Let's Trip'?" he asked, breaking their silence as he stared into the box of decorations in front of him.
The cafe was shaping up to be something contrasting and vintage, fitted with stools and tall tables and dark leather booths. They had deep-colored hardwood floors put in and the walls coated in the darkest shade of maroon they could find.
The splashes of color came through the form of decorations, of old movie posters and a shelf stocked with books and an event board they would use to pin up photos and promotions and any upcoming events.
The box was full of old road signs and license plates that he wanted to use to fill wall space.
Nick looked up from his phone, "Hm?"
Chris was interested too, pausing in his motions of flipping through their original recipe notebook. Even though it was only a year and some change old, the cover was worn and the pages were filled with colorful ink and scribbles and drafts of recipes that hadn't quite come together yet.
They had a more organized and digital list of recipes and all of the tutorials they made for TikTok, but that notebook was the source of everything and included notes and ideas no one but the triplets had seen.
"For the name of the coffee shop. Let's Trip, like triplets but backwards. It's a play on the trio brand while still not relying on it so much that new people get confused." Matt explained slowly, "And it helps set the vibe, too. Like, travelling stuff. We can make our logo a van, maybe."
"Oh my god." Nick's mouth fell open. Matt watched him with baited breath, waiting for either of his brothers to express their thoughts. When Nick spoke again, Matt's face lit up, "I love that! It's totally simple but I wouldn't of come up with it on my own."
"We can name our treats after different states." Chris added, "This can- This can give us an actual brand."
They hug after that, slotting into each other's arms easily because they were excited and had ideas and couldn't wait to get everything up and running. Chris and Nick finally have the last puzzle piece needed to finish the menu, and Matt could put together the last elements of making the coffee shop it's own.
They change their usernames later that month to 'letstripcoffeeshop' and officially announce the upcoming opening of the cafe through an Instagram post showcasing the three of them posing outside of the shop.
the barista, the baker, and the critic are ready to start a new chapter in our lives
let's trip coffee shop, coming in 2022
see you soon
--
After years of throwing around the idea, the three of them finally get to open the coffee shop in early 2022.
They had been advertising the grand opening for months and dropping hints about the menu and taking videos of small portions of the shop ever since they decided on a name and announced the existence of the cafe.
Opening day is chaotic, but they didn't really expect anything less.
"We're opening a coffee shop. This is real, this is happening." Nick came into the kitchen, letting out a breath as he was hidden from the crowd of people just outside of the storefront. The door was still locked and they were ticking closer and closer to the moment where Matt was meant to unlock the door and let in as many people as they could.
They had promised that the first one hundred people to come in could get free drinks as long as they posted photos or videos with their beverages and tagged them, so they wouldn't even turn a profit for the first few hours.
But it was okay, because hopefully the praise they would get would bring in future customers.
"I know. This is insane." Chris was the one holding a camera, zooming in on Nick's face. "Are you ready?"
"No!" he replied immediately, "But I think It'll be fun. Good, for all of us. I'm excited."
Everything was in place.
Matt had cleaned and decorated and moved things around so many times that if it wasn't perfect by now, then someone had to have messed with it. Chris had baked as much as he could ahead of time and had gotten up early that morning to finish up, sliding the still-steaming treats onto trays that were placed on display shelves that sat behind the ordering counter/bar.
They all had shirts on with the brand logo, along with name tags for people who weren't familiar with them. Chris and Nick had aprons, too, with the colorful van plastered onto their chests.
They were fully intending to sell some version of the apron on their merch website someday.
Matt had crafted the perfect playlist to 'fit the vibe' of the shop, which was already playing quietly over the speakers.
They had done everything they possibly could, and all that was left was to wait.
"Time's up." Matt came down the steps that led to the upstairs apartment, "We should all be out there to greet them. Let's go!"
"Do you think I could keep vlogging?" Chris asked, panning over to his other brother, who just shrugged without stopping to answer him, moving through the kitchen with ease and pushing the door open.
Nick followed him out, and then Chris was the last to exit the kitchen.
The later two remain behind the counter, and the former walks up to the door and unlocks it.
Then, like it's nothing, he pulls it open. Like he had rehearsed it a million times over in his head, as if he had been planning for this very moment since the beginning of time, an easy smile spreads across his face as he faces the crowd outside.
Some of them are filming, and they all seem excited when he opens the door, but none of that mattered because he knew exactly what to do.
"Welcome to Let's Trip Coffee Shop. Come on in!"
--
The coffee shop thing is admittedly overwhelming at first.
There's the people who order drinks and ask to change the most random thing about the beverage, there's the customers who leave bad reviews because they don't know the difference between a Frappe and an iced coffee.
There's the sheer amount of people coming in and out and in again during the hours they're open, but that part was a good thing.
Eventually, though, gradually and then all at once-
They settle into it. The routines, the menus, the playlists over the speakers and the regulars who came in.
There were people who knew who they were, and others who didn't. There were people who loved everything on their menu and others who always ordered the same caramel coffee and lemon blueberry muffin every single morning.
Nick was always stationed at the counter, sometimes switching between taking orders and making drinks. On the busier stretches of their days, Matt would step in and take orders and help with the simpler beverages.
When Chris wasn't baking, he was cleaning or filming for their social media or taking control of the music even though Matt hated when the vibe switched from calm to whatever the hell Chris's playlists were.
It was a lot to juggle all at once, but it was simple at it's roots.
It was a routine where they constantly worked around and with each other, bringing forth their best traits and talents and skills for the sake of the group.
It was something they had been dreaming about for years, and now it was their real life.
"So, we're filming a little vlog because we turn twenty today." Matt was the one speaking to the camera, walking through their little apartment towards the hallway where their bedrooms were. "It's been over a year since we opened the cafe, which is crazy by the way. Okay, let's see who's up."
He knocked on Nick's bedroom door, waiting for it to open. It took a beat, then two, and then the now-blonde had pulled the door open, "What the fuck? We're closed today."
"But it's our birthday!" Matt argued, "We're vlogging."
"We're twenty, yay!" Nick mumbled sarcastically, rubbing at his eyes. It was clear that he had just woken up, which caused Matt to laugh. "Is Chris even up yet? He said he baked us a cake."
"I haven't checked yet." Matt admitted, and then they're leaving Nick's room to do just that.
Chris is more awake than Nick was, excitedly attacking them in hugs once they come to his door.
They vlog a little bit throughout the morning, as they get ready and trickle downstairs and have Nick make their coffee just like when they were sixteen in their kitchen back home. Matt and Chris sat at the stools in front of the counter, the three of them chatting loosely to each other and the propped-up camera and it's so incredibly calm.
There's sunlight coming in through the windows, which are newly decorated to fit a autumn/back-to-school theme. There's posters advertising poetry and open-mic nights there at Let's Trip, courtesy of the stage they had added in after they realized how much attention those sorts of events could bring in.
There's the everlasting scent of coffee and vanilla and caramel and a million other ingredients in the air, a sign of their presence settling into the surrounding environment.
And of course, there's the triplets, together and in an establishment they built from the ground up. Together and doing something bigger and better and larger then themselves.
There they were, drinking coffee and eating birthday cake for breakfast in a place they could truly call their own.
"The cafe has this certain feeling to it. I can't put a name to it, but it's been here since we opened, at least." Chris told the other two, looking around thoughtfully. This causes his brothers to do the same.
Their eyes caught on the stage and the quarter machines by the bathrooms where kids would spend their change on temporary tattoos and bubblegum.
"It's perfect." Matt stated confidently.
"Yeah." Nick agreed, running a hand through his hair and lifting his cup to his lips. The drink tastes the same as it always done, some swirl of honey and vanilla and dark roast that all compliments each other really well.
From Chris and Nick's creations on the menu, to Matt's unique decorations, to the framed photos hung on the walls- the coffee shop was perfect.
It was personal, in a way. In every way it could be, capturing each of them and their dreams and everything they could possibly want out of this.
It was still new in the grande scheme of things, and it wasn't done growing; But it was perfect now and it always would be.
"It's ours." Chris realized. "That's what this feels like. We did this, and it's ours."
Neither of the brothers said anything else, giving him this little smile and nod, because how could they disagree? He was right in every way that mattered.
It was perfect because it was theirs, which was all it needed to be.