BmoreArt

What inspired the decision to open a café alongside your dance program?

We have both always wanted to have a food component to what we do. We both grew up in restaurants and venues, and professionally, it’s an interesting new challenge. More importantly, though, food is the number one thing that people gather around. Everything we’ve done thus far has been for the purpose of getting people together. That was important when we opened 13 years ago, but it’s even more important today. We want people to get off the internet, come out of their apartments or houses or dorm rooms, and see what happens when their lives collide with the lives of others. The café is a broader concept and it meets a need in the community. We find that people come in for coffee and a sandwich and come back for art and music.

 Can you tell us more about your partnership with Black Acres Roastery and how local collaborations like this shape the café experience?

We love our partnership with Black Acres Roastery because it feels really serendipitous. When we were looking around for a roastery to partner with, we got a number of requests to use them. We quickly realized that Matt Nierenberg, whom we know, co-owns it (with Travis Bell). Matt danced and took classes with us way back in the day before we opened the Ballroom, so we’ve known him for like 14 years. Our style when it comes to employees, partners, etc., is to either keep it in the family or bring them into the family. When we find good people we try to keep them around, and Matt’s good people. On top of that, the company is a Black-owned, ethically run coffee shop that is in our neighborhood and full of people who know their shit. You kind of can’t ask for a more obvious fit. 

What are some standout items on the café menu that have become crowd favorites?

Before we jump into this, we just have to say that we are the luckiest people in the world to have found the kitchen team we have. Our chef, Jake Cornman, has turned out to be an absolute magician—his food is so, so good. We didn’t even look for him. When we first started doing pop-ups in 2023, Dave Cavalier, our bar manager and employee of ten years, told us that he knew a guy. We trust Dave, so we were like, “We’ll give it a shot for this first pop-up.” And that was that. We now plan to be 80 years old and still eating Jake’s food. Jake brought on Kerith Poppert, who is our baker and the best-kept secret in Station North. She is a wizard, regularly referred to by our customers as the best baker in the city.

To answer your question, when we first opened, three menu items quickly became favorites: the biscuit sandwich, the rare roast beef sandwich, and the espresso cookie. Jake’s biscuits somehow have the flavor of going to your grandma’s house, but with a lightness that doesn’t leave you feeling sluggish all day. We’re not normally roast beef people, but we could eat the roast beef sandwich every day. It’s got this light horseradish slaw that’s just amazing. One of our favorite parts of being the owners is being able to make Jake put that slaw on whatever we want. Kerith makes so many incredible bakery items, but the espresso cookie is one that people show up asking about. It’s unique, beautiful, and the perfect daytime treat.

Now that we’ve been open long enough for the seasons to change, Jake and Kerith have made all sorts of new favorites as ingredients come into season.

You’ve mentioned that the café is a space for people to work, have meetings, and hone their creative projects. How have visitors been using the café so far?

We have a contingent of people who park themselves at the Ballroom to work remotely, write, and chat with others during their breaks. We’ve also got people who have meetings here or come during their lunch break. Every Friday, we transform into the Jobtown Ballroom—a tongue-in-cheek remote workday where we poke fun at the corporate affect while giving people opportunities to meet others who frequent the café. We put up a paper agenda at the start of the day, and people can add activities and invite others to take short breaks from work to join in. We also offer a free lunch break activity each week, like trivia, art parties, games, and contests.

The next thing we want to do is get people to come here to meet others during the day without the pretext of working.

Mobtown is known for its inclusive and welcoming atmosphere. How does the café expand on this ethos?

We think it’s just another place to include people and make them feel welcome. Inclusivity is something we used to work really hard on, and while we still focus on it, the culture is now so ingrained in our staff and customers that inclusivity just happens naturally. In some ways, it’s more important than ever to be welcoming, as a lot of people seem to have trepidations about going out into the world and being social after being locked down for so long during COVID. So while we used to focus primarily on making sure that people excluded from other places felt comfortable here (and we’re confident most of them do), our current job is to ease people’s social anxieties by making the first move and being super friendly.

How do you balance offering a flexible, evolving menu while staying true to your mission of serving simple, high-quality food?

Jake does not serve things that are out of season. This took us some time to get used to—we’d get really attached to something on the menu, and then it would disappear. What we and our regulars have learned is that it’s always replaced with something just as good or better. The reason everything is so good is because it’s picked from a nearby farm recently, and Jake doesn’t compromise on ingredients. We think he’s done a really good job of keeping things accessible to a normal person who comes in off the street while also making sure they’re eating really high-quality foods. It’s embarrassing, but we used to think we didn’t like tomatoes. Turns out, we just hadn’t had a good one.

What have been some of the challenges and successes of running a café alongside a dance venue?

We knew that food was a whole different ball game, and we were right. The world has changed a lot since Michael and I were young and spending all of our time in coffee shops. It’s much rarer now for people to hang out for long periods of time or to talk to strangers; we all need to be re-taught the joy of public spaces. Luckily, our dance regulars already know us to be their second home, and they’ve helped create that vibe during the day.

Our ultimate goal, which gets at both this question and your next one, is to have multiple spaces. Right now, the café shuts down at 3 p.m. so we can host events at night. We have to change over the room between night and daytime hours (which is annoying), and our customers can’t just stay from the day all the way through to the night. Eventually, we plan to have a café/restaurant/bar that is attached to but separate from the event space. That way, people will never have to leave.

Looking ahead, do you have any plans to further expand the café’s offerings or its role within the Mobtown community?

We have so many plans and ideas. Aside from what we mentioned above, we’ve been expanding our live music programming, and we want to pursue that more seriously as we settle into the neighborhood and build out the space. We’re building partnerships with other organizations, like the Parkway Theater, and there are a lot of things cooking.

Friday, (September 20th) is our 13th-anniversary celebration. It’s the first one in the new space, and it’s already sold out. While the past year has been a heavy lift—packing up the old space, moving, building the floor in the new space ourselves, and getting the café up and running—we’re really happy with all the good things that come with change, and we’re excited to see what our community does in the next 13 years.