What reopening a café in the United States looks like as businesses make efforts to flatten the curve.
BY MARK VAN STREEFKERK
BARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE
Cover photo courtesy of Nossa Familia Coffee
The COVID-19 outbreak in the United States has inflicted significant damage on the coffee industry. Independent cafés and coffee businesses have had to make hard decisions about closing or staying open in some capacity as their cities have allowed, with baristas left to grapple with suddenly reduced hours, or unemployment. As social distancing and stay-at-home measures have helped flatten the curve in some states, plans are in the works for coffee businesses to slowly reopen. While this comes as welcome news, many cafés are cautious about what that looks like, anticipating a long, uphill battle to get back to normal sales, and an even longer time to recover from business losses. In this four-part online series, we’re taking a look at several cafés in each region—the West Coast, Southwest, Northeast, and Southeast—and asking what reopening, or relaxing COVID-19 protocols, looks like for them.
For today’s West Coast focus, we’ve chatted with Nossa Familia Coffee, which has locations in Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles, as well as Portland’s Café Reina (formerly The Arrow Coffeehouse) and Los Angeles-based Menotti’s Coffee Stop.
For Nossa Familia founder Augusto Carneiro, closing all four café locations in Portland and Los Angeles made the most sense from a health and business perspective, even though as an essential business, they didn’t have to. “We wanted to look at long-term survival: let’s keep our people safe, let’s conserve finances for the future,” Augusto said, opting instead to focus on wholesale and online business.
When approaching the topic of reopening, Nossa Familia carefully considered as many factors as they could, including a community-sourced survey of 755 customer responses. On Monday, May 11, they had a soft reopening of their Pearl District location in Portland. “It’s pretty small, so it’s easy to set it up as a walk-up window,” Augusto said. “We have a garage roll-up door. We lowered it to about chest level, and we brought the cash register right up to it, so nobody goes into the café.”
The person at the register wears a mask, and there’s an A-frame sign that details Nossa’s guidelines: Customers are urged to maintain social distance, wear a mask, and order online so there’s no cash transaction. Augusto said the reopening of the Pearl District café would be a test run to determine when other shops can reopen. “It’s super hard to reopen a business. After you’ve been shut down for six weeks, you have zero inventory. You need to do deep cleaning. You need to do your schedule, and it’s not reopening with business as usual, it’s under these new norms and guidelines. You have to reinvent the flow of the place,” he says.
Some businesses, like Café Reina, never closed. Owner Erica Escalante saw the obstacle of socially distant service and quickly adapted. “The first week of not having customers in the café in mid-March, I realized it was really hard to communicate with the customers [while maintaining distance]. I hopped online and bought a drive-thru speaker box for about $600. We attached the speaker box to some signage outside so when a customer came up to the door, we could talk to them and get their order to them,” she says.
Café Reina has continued selling to-go coffee drinks, as well as cooking up a storm with their baked goods and specials, including a recent biscuits and gravy collab with Keeper Coffee Co., and a Mother’s Day French Toast special. While adapting and staying open definitely has its challenges, one of the rewards is a feeling of confidence that if they can make it through these times, they’re prepared for whatever else is coming. “We’ve taken a lot of time to get into a rhythm that we are now into and enjoying, and we’ll keep doing that for as long as it takes,” Erica says.
The three Menotti’s locations in Los Angeles all closed in mid-March, but they reopened eight days ago, debuting a new online ordering system. “Through Square we built this store online. They are a great partner for us. We see the order come in with the ticket, we signal to the customer when we received their drink, and it’s marked ‘in progress.’ They get a text notification that it’s in progress, and it should be ready within 10 minutes at that point. They wait nearby in their car, or [in person] nearby, and they come and pick it up,” says Menotti’s founder Derek Taylor.
“Staff wear masks and gloves, which took some time to get used to,” notes head barista Nicely Abel, who practiced making drinks with and without gloves so he could adjust accordingly. “I can’t deny that touch is still a huge part of my heart and soul going into these drinks. This is a whole new norm,” he says.
Since reopening, Menotti’s is excited to once again be part of their communities’ routines, and add a little levity to everyone’s day. Music has been a big part of Menotti’s, but now that their locations are takeout-only, customers can tune into their Twitch from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. to hear what Derek is spinning on the turntables inside the café.
Stay tuned for our next report on the reopening of cafés across the United States coming soon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Van Streefkerk is Barista Magazine’s social media content developer and a frequent contributor. He is also a freelance writer, social media manager, and novelist based out of Seattle. If Mark isn’t writing, he’s probably biking to his favorite vegan restaurant. Find out more on his website.