Recent social media posts
06/09/2026
Today is a very emotional day for me and our family - I’m actually crying while typing this.
Two reasons.
It’s been over 5 years since Malia (18) first worked at our original truck along Strand-on-the-Green. Today is her last day before leaving for university 🥹
Today, Lani (17) showed just how far she’s come by taking a lead role behind our coffee bar at The Draper, applying her craft that she’s so diligently practiced and studied for 5+ years. Her passion for hospitality is inspiring.
As dad and owner, I tear up seeing both these milestones. As a dad, seeing my girls thrive. As an owner, knowing we nurtured and developed amazing talent.
Dear Coco has done its job. It’s shown my girls what courage, risk, resilience and accountability look like. I’ve held them to an immensely high standard since Day 1 so they enter the world with a realistic view of how hard you have to work, every day. They’ve exceeded all my expectations.
As they both enter their next chapters, all I can do is hope their memories of growing up inside Dear Coco are as fond as mine.
Damn I love these kids. There couldn’t be a prouder dad. THANK YOU ladies 💙
Dad x
01/09/2026
Pink Lemonade AND Chips
Five years ago, I’d take Lani to the pub to watch a game of English football. Money was incredibly tight.
When we went to the pub, I had a routine.
I’d make sure Lani ate before we left home and tell her to drink tap water while we watched the game. I’d buy myself a can of Guinness from the corner shop for £1.50. In the carpark I’d pour it into a glass that I stole from the pub months earlier, and sneak it inside under my coat.
It’s simply what we had to do to experience our favourite thing together. I felt guilt and shame.
Every now and then, if we’d managed to spend a little less on the weekly grocery shop, I’d buy Lani a small glass of pink lemonade. That was a very special occasion.
Fast-forward a few years and things had changed. Dear Coco had worked. I’d rebuilt my corporate career, we’d replenished our life savings and slowly, the financial pressure that had dominated our lives started to disappear.
One Sunday afternoon, I took Lani to the pub again. I remember it so clearly.
This time, I could buy her a pink lemonade AND chips. I could order myself a Guinness from the bar and sit at our table without feeling shame.
Lani probably thought nothing of it. But watching her, I felt something I hadn’t felt for a very long time. Wealth.
Not the kind you measure in property, cars or money in the bank. The kind you feel when you no longer have to worry about whether you can afford the tiny things.
That little glass of pink lemonade and those chips represented years of hard work, sacrifice, mistakes, risk and relentless determination.
But perhaps most importantly, they represented something I had wanted from the beginning - to provide my girls with a happy, loving childhood.
Today, Lani tells me our father-daughter pub dates are some of her fondest childhood memories.
She doesn’t remember the £1.50 Guinness can. She doesn’t remember the financial hardship. She remembers time with her dad.
A pink lemonade. A bowl of chips. A football match. And my daughter sitting beside me. That’s wealth to me.
That’s the end of the 7 Stories Series. Thank you for being so kind with my stories. I’ve loved sharing with you.
Ant x
31/08/2026
The Biggest Decision of All
As the coffee truck build started to come together, there was one big decision still sitting in front of me.
What the heck was I going to call it?
The name would be printed on the side of the truck, appear on every coffee cup, sit across our social media and, hopefully, become something people remembered.
No pressure then.
One night I was lying in bed scrolling through potential names in my head. I must have written two A4 pages of them. Some were OK. Some were passable. Most were terrible.
Nothing connected.
I didn’t want a clever coffee name. I didn’t want something that sounded like every other specialty coffee business. I wanted something emotional. Something personal. Something that could tell people a little bit about who we were before they’d even met us.
Then, completely out of nowhere, the lightning bolt hit me. Dear Coco.
It was the name of our youngest daughter, who was five years old at the time.
The idea was simple. Her two older sisters were old enough to work in the business, but Coco was too young. So I wanted her to feel just as loved, just as included and just as much a part of what we were building.
Dear Coco. A love letter to our little girl. It immediately felt right.
I could explain the entire business in one sentence:
“Dear Coco is built as a love letter to our five-year-old daughter, Coco. Given the age gap, she can’t work on the business like her two older sisters can, so we named it after her to make her feel loved and included too.”
It was emotional, personal and it satisfied my marketing brain.
The name would go on to become much more than branding.
It would give us permission to tell a different kind of business story. Not just about our coffee truck, but about family, ambition, failure, resilience, love and all the messy stuff that happens behind the scenes.
I had no idea I’d just named something that would change all of our lives, and act as an apology letter to Coco for my actions years earlier, as much as a love letter to her now.
Story 7 (the last one) drops tomorrow.
Ant x
30/08/2026
Wasting Away
By this point, I was physically spent. I was working beyond an acceptable amount.
I was working a demanding corporate job while bartending secretly at night, trying to keep our family financially afloat.
Every evening, once the kids were in bed, I’d leave the house and walk. Ten or fifteen kilometres along the River Thames.
At first, the walks were my escape. They gave me somewhere to clear my head and release the pressure that had been building inside me. But over hundreds of kilometres, something else started happening. I was losing weight.
I’d always been naturally slim, but now the weight was disappearing quickly. I wasn’t walking to lose weight, but I started to notice the changes in my body.
Then one afternoon, I took Malia to a London park to meet a friend during lockdown. The mother of her friend came over to say hello. As we talked, I could sense she was trying to find the right words. Eventually she said: “Ant, you are looking very thin.”
I was caught off guard. After she left, I sat there pretty bruised. I looked at myself. The body I thought I knew had changed dramatically. My clothes were hanging off me. My arms had become incredibly thin. I looked at an iPhone photo of my face and barely recognised the person staring back. She was right.
But rather than being concerned, something inside my head twisted. I became obsessed with losing more weight. I ate less. I walked further. I weighed myself twice a day. I got down to a dangerously low 65 kgs.
I would stand naked in front of the mirror searching for parts of my body I could still convince myself needed to disappear. I was becoming obsessed with being the skinniest version of myself. And the strangest thing was that I had absolutely no idea how I had got there.
Eventually, I realised those walks had started as a way to escape the pressure, but I had unknowingly turned them into another source of pressure. I was trying to control the one thing I felt I could control: my body.
Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t really fighting my body. I was fighting everything that was going on inside my head, and it was utter chaos.
Story 6 drops tomorrow.
Ant x
29/08/2026
The Night I Became a £4.30 per hour Bartender
By this point, I was trying rebuilding my career in London after a disastrous move from Sydney.
I’d landed a Senior Marketing Manager role at American Express and was working harder than ever to prove myself. For sixteen months I travelled across Europe, built relationships and worked towards a Director-level position that didn’t even exist yet.
On the surface, things were going well. But financially, we were in serious trouble.
The UK immigration disaster had left us with no savings, and our family simply couldn’t survive on my salary alone. Emma was looking after three young children, including two-year-old Coco, so finding a way to bring in more money was my responsibility.
Then, one rainy London night, I walked out of the Amex office in my full business attire and walked into my local Chiswick pub and asked if they needed a bartender.
I needed three evening shifts a week, and I’d be doing it in secret. Nobody at American Express would know.
By day, I was working for one of the world’s biggest brands. By night, I was quietly pulling pints for minimum wage. I was forty years old, and the job would earn me just £4.30 per hour after tax. It wasn’t going to solve our financial problems, but it would help put groceries on the table.
The Pub Manager didn’t quite know what had hit her when I walked in the door. I was massively overqualified, having worked as a bar manager, restaurant manager and group operations manager earlier in my career.
But none of that mattered. I needed the money and I wasn’t embarrassed about working for it. I’ve never believed that any honest work is beneath me. Its honourable to do a job because your family needs you to, regardless of your title or what other people might think.
So there I was. Marketing Manager by day, Bartender by night. Trying to rebuild our family’s bank balance one shift at a time.
Looking back, I’m incredibly proud of that period. It showed my daughters I was willing to do whatever it takes.
Little did I know, this work effort would lead to something seismic happening to me just over the horizon.
Story 5 drops tomorrow.
Ant x
28/08/2026
The Boss Who Saved Me
This is a story about asking for help.
By this point, our London adventure had gone badly wrong.
My family was split across two hemispheres. Emma and our two older girls had left for London as planned, but couldn’t secure anywhere to live.
I was back in Sydney navigating UK visa issues, raising one-year-old Coco and working from my parents’ apartment. We thought Coco and I would follow in a week or so. How wrong we were.
We were running out of money, I was drowning in guilt and my UK visa application had become a bureaucratic nightmare.
After months of separation, an immigration lawyer finally told me: “Ant, you will NOT get your UK visa. You need to bring your family back to Australia.”
I felt like I had failed everyone. But I wasn’t prepared to give up. I realised my employer, ANZ Bank, had a small operation in London. If I could somehow transfer my employment from Australia to the UK, I could potentially solve the problem preventing my visa.
It was an outrageous ask. The role would need to be created from scratch. It didn’t exist, and there was no obvious reason for the business to do it. But I had nothing left to lose, so I went to see my boss, Tracey.
I told her everything. The visa disaster. The family separation. The homelessness. The financial pressure. The guilt I was carrying. And then I cried - three months’ worth of tears came out in about thirty minutes. I was completely exposed, wondering what on earth my boss could do about the mess I’d created.
Then Tracey did something I’ll never forget. She put her hand on my shoulder and said: “I’ll solve this problem with you, Ant.”
She didn’t have to. This was my problem, not hers. But Tracey was one of those leaders who genuinely cared about her people. She knew how to navigate an organisation, had relationships at every level and, as I put it in the book, she got s^*t done.
For months I had felt completely alone, buried beneath a bureaucratic system so big that nobody could hear me scream. Then someone reached below the waterline and offered me a hand.
Months later I made it to London and reunited with my family.
Story 4 drops tomor
27/08/2026
The Daughter I Almost Didn’t Meet
This is the story I find hardest to tell.
A few weeks after Emma and I had decided to move our family from Sydney to London, we discovered she was pregnant with our third child. It wasn’t part of the plan.
The girls were seven and eight years old. We were preparing for an enormous international move. We had careers all this relied on, a house to organise and a completely new life to build. And suddenly there was another life to think about.
I didn’t handle the news well. I was overwhelmed by the thought of starting again with a newborn just as we were preparing to uproot everything.
Fear took over, and in that fear, I made some decisions and said some things that I deeply regret.
I put enormous pressure on Emma at a moment when she needed support from me. Looking back now, I can see how selfish I was.
There was a point where I genuinely questioned whether we should continue with the pregnancy. I convinced Emma to visit a pregnancy clinic to assess our options.
That’s difficult for me to write. Not because I don’t want to talk about it, but because I know there are people reading this who have lived through their own personal experiences around pregnancy.
Every family has its own circumstances, its own fears and its own decisions to make. This is just my story.
The next morning, something changed inside me. I sat down with Emma and poured everything out. I apologised profusely. I told her I would never put her in that position again. I told her I wanted to keep our baby.
Something happened in me that morning. The fear that had been dominating my thinking was replaced by an overwhelming love for a child I hadn’t even met.
That child was Coco. She was born in May 2016.
And today, it is impossible for me to imagine our family without her. From the moment I first held her, she became a central part of who I am.
Looking back, I don’t pretend that the difficult period never happened. It did and it left scars.
Five years later, that little girl would inspire a decision that changed the course of all our lives again.
Story 3 drops tomorrow.
Ant x
26/08/2026
The Question That Set Everything in Motion.
It was 2015. Freshwater Beach, Sydney.
I was 37, married to the woman I adored, with two beautiful daughters, a great career and a life most people would probably describe as pretty close to perfect.
I remember standing on that beach and looking at everything we had created. I felt incredibly lucky.
But I also had this strange feeling that something was missing. Not happiness. Not love. Not success. Adventure.
I had travelled extensively before having children. I’d lived overseas, travelled through more than 30 countries, lived in a campervan with mates and generally thrown myself into life.
Now I could picture the next twenty years with almost uncomfortable clarity.
And although it was a beautiful picture, I wasn’t sure I wanted to look at the same picture for the rest of my life.
So, I turned to Emma and completely spontaneously, I asked “How would you feel about moving the family to London?”
She asked why. So, I did what I do best - I told her a story.
I painted a picture of European weekends, Paris being two hours away, the girls growing up with a European influence, and Emma having the opportunity to develop her baking business. It sounded incredible.
Apparently, I was quite convincing. Because Emma said yes immediately, and hugged me like we’d just got engaged.
There was only one small problem. I hadn’t actually thought about what would happen if she said yes.
Suddenly, the comfortable life I had been questioning was being packed into boxes. Our home was going to be rented out. Our cats needed new homes. We were preparing to move our family to the other side of the world.
I had no idea what was coming. I didn’t know that this one spontaneous question would eventually lead to some of the hardest years of our lives.
Financial devastation. Family separation. Guilt. Fear. And eventually, a coffee truck.
Looking back now, I realise something. Sometimes the biggest changes in your life don’t begin with a five-year plan. Sometimes they begin with a question. And sometimes you have absolutely no idea where that question is going to take you.
Story 2 drops tomorrow.
Ant x
25/08/2026
There are seven moments in my life that, looking back, changed everything.
I’ve written about them in my book “Dear Coco: The coffee truck that changed my life”, but I’ve never shared them here.
So, for the next seven days, I’m going back to where it all began — sharing the moments, decisions, mistakes and people that shaped the journey.
One story. Every day. Seven days.
Story 1 drops tomorrow.
Ant x
25/08/2026
There are seven moments in my life that, looking back, changed everything.
I’ve written about them in my book “Dear Coco: The coffee truck that changed my life”, but I’ve never shared them here.
So, for the next seven days, I’m going back to where it all began — sharing the moments, decisions, mistakes and people that shaped the journey.
One story. Every day. Seven days.
Story 1 drops tomorrow.
Ant x
Address
Opposite 85 Strand On The Green
London
W4 3NN
Option 1: Public Transport
Take the Tube to Notting Hill Gate Station. Take the exit towards Portobello Road, and walk straight until you reach Westbourne Grove. Turn left and continue until you see the coffee shop.
Option 2: Driving/Parking
From Central London, head west on A40 towards Paddington. Turn right onto Westbourne Bridge Road, then take a slight left onto Chepstow Villas. At the roundabout, take the second exit onto Pembridge Villas. Continue straight to Pembridge Road and turn left onto Kensington Park Road. The coffee shop is on your right-hand side. Parking options are limited, so consider using a nearby car park or street parking may be available for a fee during off-peak hours.
Opening Hours
| Monday |
8am - 3pm |
| Wednesday |
8am - 3pm |
| Thursday |
8am - 3pm |
| Friday |
8am - 3pm |
| Saturday |
8am - 3pm |
| Sunday |
8am - 3pm |
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What people say
Dear Coco Street Coffee is a specialty coffee shop located along the River Thames in London. They offer a wide variety of delicious bakes and little sweet treats that are perfect for pairing with their exceptional coffee. The storytelling aspect of this coffee shop adds to the overall experience, making it more than just a place to grab a quick cup of joe.
What sets Dear Coco Street Coffee apart from other coffee shops is their commitment to serving only the highest quality specialty coffee. They take pride in sourcing beans that have been graded out of 100 and have low defects in sweetness, acidity, balance, and mouthfeel. This dedication to quality is evident in every sip of their delicious coffee.
The leadership style at Dear Coco Street Coffee is also worth mentioning. The owner, Anthony Duckworth, believes in leading with autonomy and hiring the best humans possible to set them up for success. This approach creates a positive work environment that translates into excellent customer service.
Overall, Dear Coco Street Coffee is an exceptional coffee shop that offers high-quality specialty coffee and delicious treats in a beautiful location along the River Thames. If you're looking for an unforgettable coffee experience in London, be sure to visit Dear Coco Street Coffee!
