Sonder – Truro

Sonder is located at 6 Princes Street, Truro, Cornwall.

Listed as a Bar, a Cafe and a Restaurant, Sonder serves a range of cuisine, majoring on Burgers, brunches, salads and sandwiches.

We try our hardest to source quality craft beer, spirits and wine that you can’t find anywhere else locally.

We back this up with amazing coffee from Olfactory Coffee Roasters in Penryn, our selection of cocktails and an amazing, regularly changing food menu.

With everything we do we keep choice and the environment in mind, hoping to give you the best experience possible and limit our impact on the planet.

Our Story

We get asked all the time ‘where does the name come from’ and ‘are you part of a chain’. The answer to the second question is easy – Sonder is a truly independent entity. We are not tied to any particular brewery or wholesaler. As any business we will agree short term deals to our advantage but we can buy our food and drink from anywhere in the world, and we do.

The name is a longer story. Are you sat comfortably? A version of Sonder has been in the planning for a number of years. The idea being the same from the start, however, the name wasn’t. Sonder is a family run business and during a family discussion it was decided that the name wasn’t quite right. After weeks of deliberation and some pretty ridiculous ideas it was a comment from our then 16 year old daughter.

‘My favourite word at the moment is Sonder’

This was followed by an explanation of and introduction to a very talented American writer, John Koenig, and his blog a Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows. John describes the blog as a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.

John’s definition is: the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

We often simplify it with our interpretation. The realisation that everyone’s life is as chaotic and complicated as your own.

No where near as poetic as John but you get the idea. The name just fits with everything we do.