Café Gusto was cre­ated at the end of 1999 by Mar­i­anne Delaney and Denis O’Mullane when they took over the the famous O’Brien’s Cof­fee Shop at 3, Wash­ing­ton St Cork, a city land­mark which had oper­ated from that site since 1941.

Mar­i­anne — the lead/​primary cre­ative force in Café Gusto, stud­ied in the UK dur­ing the ’90s and worked exten­sively in the UK, Aus­tralia and New Zealand, before return­ing back to Cork in 1998.

From her trav­els came the pas­sion for great cof­fee and food, and she con­cen­trated her efforts in sourc­ing the very best ingre­di­ents, pro­duc­ers and sup­pli­ers, in par­tic­u­lar those from the The Eng­lish Mar­ket just across the road from the café.

Marianne’s per­sonal jour­ney with food has seen her win numer­ous awards for the café, and she serves on the com­mit­tee of the Cork Sus­tain­abil­ity Coun­cil. The café was one of the early adopters of com­postable pack­ag­ing which is now so pop­u­lar. Mar­i­anne has a great per­sonal inter­est in grow­ing and using her own food, which feeds into the pas­sion in the food served in Café Gusto.

Fol­low­ing on from the suc­cess of the the first Café, they decided to open another Café Gusto on Lapp’s Quay. This new high-​rise busi­ness on the river proved to be the per­fect loca­tion for the new café with its water­side set­ting and large out­door seat­ing area, with views of the City Hall and the port.

This opened the door to a lot of cor­po­rate busi­ness for Café Gusto: from early morn­ing break­fasts and lux­u­ri­ous cof­fee breaks to laid on lunches for the offices around Cork. Clients include UCC, Mall­ware­bytes, Face­book and The Law Library.

In 2019 and 2020, both cafés were restyled and redressed for the new decade with a par­tic­u­lar empha­sis on out­side cater­ing and deliveries.

Both part­ners also run the pop­u­lar Lib­erty Grill, also sit­u­ated on Wash­ing­ton Street.