What Monaco means for Angel + Your personal invitation

For the past few years, wellness has increasingly started to feel like something we need to manage. There is always another thing to track, improve or optimise: our steps, our sleep, our glucose, our recovery, our supplements, our morning routines, our evening routines.

And I understand the appeal of all of it. I have spent more than a decade working with food and wellness, and I am still genuinely curious about new research, longevity, nutrition and the technologies that can help us understand our bodies better.

But lately I have been thinking about the other side of it.

I hear it from friends who work in wellness and biohacking, and I notice it in myself too: something that is supposed to help us feel better can very easily become another thing to get right. There is always something we could be doing better: sleeping a little more, training differently, taking another supplement, improving another score. And when real life gets in the way, we can end up feeling as though we are somehow failing at wellness too.
I don’t think that is where this is heading. This week in Angel Wellness Club, we are talking about The Future of Wellness, and the more I think about it, the more I believe the next stage will feel simpler, more natural and much more integrated into everyday life.

Of course, technology will still have a place. There are so many useful tools being developed, and I think they will help us understand ourselves in ways we couldn’t before. But I want those tools to support our lives, not become the centre of them.

The same goes for habits. We try different things, keep what genuinely makes us feel better, and let go of what doesn’t. Over time, the habits that really work for us stop feeling like “wellness habits” at all, they simply become part of everyday life.

For me, that is where wellness becomes truly sustainable: when it stops feeling like a separate project and starts feeling like life.

When I started Angel, I thought mostly about food.

For a long time, the product itself occupied almost all of my attention: ingredients, recipes, texture, flavour, how to make something lighter without making it less enjoyable, how to create a breakfast or dessert that feels good not only while you are eating it but afterwards too.

This is still incredibly important to me. Food remains the foundation of Angel, and I still think about recipes in exactly this way.

But over the years I started noticing something around the product that became just as important. People were creating their own habits and memories around Angel:

I have watched people find their favourite tables, bring their children, meet friends every weekend and get to know our team. We have guests who first came to us more than seven years ago and still associate certain dishes with very specific memories 🪽

At some point I realised that the food itself was only the beginning.

What surrounds it matters just as much: the people, the atmosphere, the way you feel in a space, what gradually becomes familiar and starts belonging to your everyday life.

That changed the way I understood what we were building 💚

We often talk about willpower when we talk about wellness. We think we need more discipline to eat well, exercise regularly, sleep enough or change our habits.

Some effort is always part of any change, of course. But I don’t think a healthy lifestyle should depend on making difficult decisions all day long.

It becomes much easier when your environment supports you:

This is one of the reasons I have become much less interested in talking about wellness through restriction.

Even with food, I don’t particularly like thinking in terms of I’m not allowed to eat this or I have to avoid that. I find it much more natural to think:
this is what I choose because this is how I want to feel.

The difference may sound small, but to me it changes the whole relationship with wellness. I don’t want food to become mathematics, movement to become punishment or longevity to become a fear of ageing. I want all these things to contribute to a life that is enjoyable now.

The longer we build Angel, the more Dima and I also think differently about scale.

When you run a business, it is very easy to measure growth through numbers: locations, cities, countries, audiences. We have opportunities to grow faster, but I’m not particularly interested in growth just for the sake of being bigger anymore.

What interests me much more is depth. How do you build a place people genuinely return to? How does a brand stop being somewhere you bought something once and become part of your life?

You can open a hundred locations that people visit once and forget. Or you can have a place where someone has breakfast every Saturday for five years, knows the team, brings friends and feels that it is somehow theirs too.

For me, this is also where Angel Cakes and Angel Wellness Club come together.

Angel Cakes creates this world physically.
Angel Wellness Club allows us to extend the same ideas beyond a particular café or city: through knowledge, conversations, events and a community of people who are interested in many of the same things.

They are different parts of the same idea. We are trying to create an environment for the kind of life we ourselves would like to live: healthier, yes, but also beautiful, social, interesting, enjoyable and real.

We have been working on Angel Cakes Monaco for around a year and a half, and during that time the meaning of this project has changed for me several times.

Every new Angel makes me return to the same question: what exactly are we building?

Monaco has made me think about it particularly deeply because here, in many ways, we have had to start again. A new team, new suppliers, new processes — all the things that are already established when you have been running a business for many years.

It has been challenging, but I am also very happy that I had to become so involved again. And somehow, through this process, I have rediscovered Angel for myself too. It reminded me of the early openings, when everything was still being created by hand and every small decision felt important.

That is also why our first month or two in Monaco will be very much a technical opening period. We have built everything here from scratch, and I want to give the space and the team the time they need. I want to meet the people who live here, see what they choose for breakfast, learn which tables become their favourites and which dishes become their usual orders. I want to understand what we can adapt to local habits while still staying true to what Angel is 🪽 Because there is a big difference between simply opening a café in Monaco and becoming part of people’s lives in Monaco.

I hope that, with time, Angel will stop feeling like a new place. I would love for it to become somewhere people come without really thinking about it: for breakfast, for coffee, with their children, with friends or on their own. Somewhere they know they will feel comfortable and where they often stay a little longer than they planned 💚

For me, places like this are also part of wellness. A good environment, familiar people, food that makes you feel good, beauty around you, a sense of community and small everyday pleasures all contribute to how we feel far more than we sometimes realise.

If you have read to the end of my first Founder Series note, I want to share something with you that we are not announcing publicly yet.

Before the official opening of Angel Cakes Monaco, we would love to open the doors first to Angel Wellness Club members.

After more than a year of working on this space, I would love to celebrate this moment with the people who already understand what we have been trying to build for all these years.

Come by at any time between 10 AM and 3 PM to see the space, spend some time with us and be among the first to experience Angel Cakes Monaco before we officially open.

It feels very special to open these doors first to you.
I’m so looking forward to welcoming you and sharing this moment together.

Alina 🪽