Boutique coffee comes to Ifould Street in WOTSO Workspace’s ground floor café, First Order.

In the light-filled ground floor of the WOTSO Workspace building, First Order has entered Adelaide’s ever-expanding coffee scene.

“Coffee kind of sucks you in. I think any barista-turned-café-owner that you talk to, that’s the same story – they just get sucked into this world,” First Order’s owner, Anya Sereda, says.

After leaving university for the greener pastures of the hospitality industry, Anya has worked in some of the city and surrounding suburbs’ favourite coffee stops – The Middle Store, Hey Jupiter and Elementary are all on her résumé.

Through this experience, Anya formulated an idea of the kind of café she would want to create.

“I think you get to a point where you think you know what you’re doing, then you kind of just want to prove to yourself that you can stop judging what other people are doing and you can do it for yourself,” she says.

The built form of the café (courtesy of Masamune) is light and industrial, playing off the warehouse feel of the space, and aligning with the open layout of their ground floor neighbour, Austin Bloom.

“It’s the ultimate warehouse feel. It’s just huge, and the natural light… It just had that grungy, industrial, but so naturally bright and happy. There was just always so much potential in the space,” Anya says.

While the café has no theme, Anya has drawn inspiration from her family in more ways than one – much of the ceramic work in the space was designed and created by her mum, Ellen Orlova (AKA Ego Ceramics); and a prominent dish on the menu, the semolina porridge, is an Eastern European dish she remembers being “force fed” as a child.

“I think our menu’s a little bit different than lots of other places, which is definitely something that I wanted to do,” Anya says.

When choosing a local coffee roaster, Elementary was an easy decision.

“Brad [Nixon, Elementary’s owner] and I have known each other for 15 years or something crazy like that. A really long time, so I didn’t really have a choice,” Anya laughs.

“I was just waiting for him to open a roastery so I’d have an excuse to open a café.”

The most important part of the business though, Anya says, is the ability to adapt as the business grows.

“I wanted something that could be ever-changing. One of the biggest things for me in opening something was that I could be in control of change. If I don’t like it, or if people don’t like it, I can just change it,” she says.