Melissa Easter is a bit of a victim of her own success. The owner of the 2-year-old La Taza Coffee House in Belmont has been seducing crowds with her Latin-inspired full menu—breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week—and cooking up her hot and spicy dishes for the cool jazz cats at Saxx Jazz and Blues Lounge next door, and it seems her first Latin lover may feel a bit scorned. Of course, we’re talking about the dark and handsome, er, coffee bean. O.K., before you start rolling your eyes at our histrionics and anthropomorphism, you should know that when Restaurantarama asked Easter what inspired her to roll out a La Taza outpost—a coffee cart that is—in the lobby of the Ix Building two weeks ago, she told us, “I wanted to go back to my first love and really promote the coffee line.”
From the grounds up: Melissa Easter gets back to basics with the La Taza coffee cart, now serving in the Ix Building, south of the Downtown Mall.
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In fact, Easter told us she felt a little scorned herself when she recently noticed an unofficial rating of local coffee houses on the blog cvillain.com and found La Taza barely made the list. Dudes, the girl brews some seriously sweet and socially conscious coffee! All of La Taza’s java is Rainforest Alliance certified and either fair trade or comes directly from growers, many of whom Easter has met personally. She just returned from a coffee excursion to Guatemala, and this past Saturday she held a low country boil to raise money for a solar-powered coffee mill to support the sustainable growers there.
But that rating hurt. Could it be that local coffee drinkers have been so charmed by Easter’s use of chipotle that they’ve given the caffeine the cold shoulder?
Well, no worries anymore. The girl, at least, and her coffee have been reunited in a little love shack at Ix. The coffee cart is in residence five days a week from 8 to 11am and 2 to 3pm, so consider stopping by for a cup of joe even if you don’t live or work around those parts. That way your eyes won’t be tempted by the other lusty fare at the flagship store. You’ll be 100 percent coffee committed.
Brown bag brigade
You’ve heard the one about cutting your hair makes it grow faster, right? Well, we know (after a painfully bad grow-out) that that’s, like, poppycock. But when Baggby’s’ Jon LaPanta told us his family had sold their 8-year-old Forest Lakes location (the new owners have renamed the space Café LaJoi) as part of a “shrink before you grow” strategy, we followed the logic. Jon’s parents, Mike and Ann, opened the original Baggby’s gourmet sandwich shop on the Downtown Mall 14 years ago. (And we give them serious props for braving the Mall when it was still a deserted Goth haven as well as for their homey sandwiches, salads and cookies and neighborhood atmosphere). But the elder LaPantas are, in Mike’s words, “moving into retirement mode.”
Son Jon, who had run the Forest Lakes outpost, has come home to the headquarters to take over that operation, yes, but also to work on packaging up the Baggby’s brand into little brown bags for license. Mike says many transient customers—parents of UVA students, for example—have been pestering him for years about opening up additional locations, and so the family is getting ready to produce little offspring. They won’t be franchising, however, says Jon. Rather, the family will license the concept—the brown bag ordering process, for example, and their method for spinning out freshly made, homemade fare at a fast food pace. Jon says that by contracting rather than franchising, budding Baggby’s entrepreneurs can “be their own boss” without having to comply with onerous franchise regulations that stipulate things like hours of operation.
Having to rise at the crack of dawn every day to make fresh chicken salad and those little chocolate chip cookie bites sounds onerous itself to us, but, hey, that’s why we don’t own restaurants, we just write about them.
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