GOCO Café

Order at GOCO Café and what arrives is a familiar Starbucks drink: an espresso latte, a brewed coffee, a hot or iced tea, a blended cold drink or a hot chocolate, handed across a counter set inside Glen Ivy Hot Springs. Light snacks sit alongside. The café was built as a convenience for people already moving through a spa day, not as a destination kitchen.

Starbucks drinks and light snacks at the counter

The drinks list is the recognisable Starbucks one, which is the whole idea: guests get a known order without leaving the property or breaking the rhythm of the day. Espresso-based lattes and cappuccinos, brewed coffee, hot and iced teas, blended cold drinks and non-coffee options such as hot chocolate cover most of what a long afternoon asks for. Food stays deliberately small, the café counterpart to the fuller menus served elsewhere on site, so nothing here needs a table or a wait.

A resort counter rather than a dining room

GOCO Café opened at the start of 2017, a year after GOCO Hospitality took over Glen Ivy Hot Springs, and was the first café the group built under its own name. Its name comes straight from that parent company. It broadened what the long-running hot springs resort could serve without turning the café into a restaurant. The setting shapes everything: this is an amenity inside a sixty-acre wellness property, reached between the mineral pools and the treatment rooms rather than from a street corner. The resort draws a large crowd through the year, and the café's job is to keep those people supplied without sending them off the property. Service is counter-based and quick, which suits guests in robes with an hour between bookings.

Order by the rhythm of the spa day

Time the order to the visit. Brewed coffee or an espresso drink fits the start, before the pools; iced tea, cold coffee or a blended drink fits the gap between soaking and a treatment, when something cold matters more than something hot. Hot chocolate is the late-afternoon choice for anyone who has had enough caffeine. Add a light snack if the next meal is still hours away. The café is best treated as a pause rather than a meal, a familiar cup in a secluded place, which is exactly the job it was built to do.