Iconik expanding to ex-tire store

Coffee shop owner: New location’s theme is ‘post-apocalyptic gas station’

For 10 years, Iconik Coffee Roasters has been off the beaten path at Lena Street Lofts and since 2018 tucked away in a onetime Catholic school on Guadalupe Street.

Iconik owner Sean Ham has relished the idea of giving customers “the experience of discovery” at cafes one first has to find.

Now he’s opening a third Iconik cafe this week in the former Discount Tire shop at 1366 Cerrillos Road.

Cerrillos is not exactly off the beaten path, but Ham insists Iconik Red, as he is referring to the Cerrillos location, will be “hidden in plain sight.”

Ham doesn’t intend to put up an Iconik Red sign. The building will continue to have the same anonymous, blank car shop look it has had since Discount Tire moved to a neighboring property in 2021.

“I want to preserve the effect of discovering something new,” Ham said.

Iconik Red is on the goingto-work-downtown side of the street but has no drive-thru. Ham doesn’t see his cafe as a place to pick up a cup of coffee on the way to the office.

“This is a place to come and hang out,” he said.

Ham repurposed the Discount Tire red tire racks that had remained in the building and now are part of the bar counter. The bare concrete floor remains. Nine hundred potted plants are embedded in one wall.

“The theme is a post-apocalyptic gas station, implying everything is overgrown,” Ham said.

Even before Discount Tire opened at 1372 Cerrillos Road in October 2021, Ham already had intentions to open an Iconik cafe at the old location, where Discount Tire had operated since 1984. Before that, the building built in 1972 had an auto service garage.

Ham said he saw construction completing at the new Discount tire shop, and “I started to do some detective work. I found the owner of this building and talked about putting an Iconik in here. This used to be an old service station. I always wanted to have a café in an old service station.”

Darren Berry; his sister, Natalie Slade; and longtime friend Todd Spitzer opened Iconik Coffee at the Lena Street Lofts on Lena Street in 2013. Spitzer went on to co-found Opuntia Cafe.

Ham and the Lena Street Lofts owners acquired Iconik in 2015, and Ham became the face of the company. Lena Street Lofts and Ham parted ways as Iconik owners in September with Ham now the sole owner, but Iconik Lena and Iconik Guadalupe will remain open, Ham said.

Coffee roasting remains at the Lena location for now, but Cerrillos has storage space now for roasted coffee.

Along with three cafes, Iconik Coffee Roasters also has wholesale distribution to 28 restaurants and resorts across New Mexico. Ham declined to disclose the business balance of cafes and wholesale.

“Every location has a different menu,” Ham said.

Breakfast burritos and breakfast tacos are at all three, but specific to Iconik Red will be the breakfast sirloin and paleo scramble, he said.

Iconik Red will open from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. “and expand hours from there,” Ham said.

“In this location, I’ll be able to host more community events,” he said.