They Met at an AeroPress Championship

The origin story of Rush Rush Coffee is one of specialty coffee's most romantic. Simon Derutter and Nanigui Patel did not meet at a coffee school, a roastery, or a café. They met at an AeroPress Championship — one of the specialty coffee world's most convivial competition formats, where precision brewing meets community gathering and the atmosphere is rather less austere than the World Barista Championship. Simon and Nanigui competed, connected, and eventually built a life and a business together: Rush Rush Coffee, which opened in Antwerp in 2020.

Simon had learned his craft at MOK — one of Belgium's most respected specialty roasters and a regular presence in European specialty media. Nanigui had worked at Caffènation, the Antwerp roastery and café that is widely credited as the birthplace of Belgian specialty coffee: the place that introduced the third wave to Flanders before the third wave had a name. Their different professional backgrounds — Simon's roasting knowledge from MOK, Nanigui's hospitality and coffee culture from Caffènation — gave Rush Rush a balance from the beginning: production rigour and customer warmth in equal measure.

After leaving their employers, they managed a café for a friend couple who went on sabbatical — a temporary arrangement that clarified their vision and accelerated their timeline. Rush Rush opened faster and more unexpectedly than they had planned, in a beautiful Antwerp townhouse in Zurenborg, the elegant residential neighbourhood east of the city centre. "I feel like people who come here want to take their time," Nanigui has said. That sense of deliberate, unhurried enjoyment defines the Rush Rush experience.

AeroPress Champions: The Competition Pedigree

Rush Rush's connection to AeroPress is not just biographical — it is a competitive achievement of international significance. Simon holds both the 2018 and 2022 Belgian AeroPress Championship titles, and in 2022 placed second at the World AeroPress Championship — one of specialty coffee's most globally contested competitions, with national champions from dozens of countries competing for the world title. Second in the world is an extraordinary result for a roastery that had been open for only two years at the time of the competition.

The AeroPress connection also directly informs Rush Rush's roasting philosophy. AeroPress brewing — with its flexibility of temperature, ratio, pressure, and contact time — rewards coffees that are expressive, fruit-forward, and florally complex: exactly the character that Rush Rush selects and roasts for. "We carefully select beans that appeal to what we like to drink and choose light roasts because we enjoy fruity, floral flavors that are true to the fruit," Simon and Nanigui explain on their website. "Things that taste damn good" is their informal quality standard — unpretentious, specific, and genuine.

Antwerp: The Cradle of Belgian Specialty

Antwerp has a specific claim in Belgian coffee history. Caffènation — where Nanigui began her career — is widely regarded as the place where Belgian specialty coffee was born: the roastery and café that demonstrated, ahead of the wave, that Belgium's coffee culture could be as serious and quality-driven as Norway's or Denmark's. From that beginning, Antwerp has cultivated a cluster of respected specialty operations — MOK, where Simon trained, Rush Rush, and others — that has made the city a genuine destination for specialty coffee within the Benelux region.

Rush Rush's café at Lange Altaarstraat 29 in Zurenborg is a beautiful reflection of its Antwerp context: a historic townhouse with interior details from its previous lives (an office, a night shop), now transformed into a bright, airy space where coffee and food — both made as much as possible in-house, including a kitchen that produces the food menu — are served with warmth and expertise. The café grew from two people to seven in two years: a pace of growth driven entirely by quality and word of mouth.

"Coffee-obsessed Simon and Nanigui took up residence in this opulent Antwerp townhouse, after colliding (and falling in love) at an AeroPress championship." — Rush Rush Coffee website