Ella Café to open location at Embassy Lakes Plaza
Stacey Elias goes to Ella Café, once a week. She’s not even a coffee drinker, she usually orders a hot chocolate topped with what she calls a “generous amount of whipped cream” or — on the complete opposite end of the spectrum — an unsweetened ice tea. But she always orders cookies. The registered nurse even takes two of the chocolate chip variety to-go for her kids, who say they’re the “best cookies ever.”
“You feel catered to and special when you’re dining there,” said the Cooper City resident. She’s been making the drive to the Plantation-based café since it opened two years ago. And she’s not the only one. The café has garnered over 4,000 followers on Facebook and a four-and-a-half star rating on Yelp.
But now, Elias will be able to get that same experience, without the long drive.
On Aug. 20, Ella Café will open a second location in Cooper City’s Embassy Lakes Plaza. Owner Jason Gol said it’s one of the eight he hopes to open within the next three or four years.
“I have a different approach because I’m not going out east where everyone with the tattoos and beards and plaid shirts all open right across the street from each other,” Gol said. “We’re doing this out in the suburbs where people live. They all live out here and have nowhere to go. Cooper City was my choice because there’s nothing really out here.”
The Plantation resident grew up in Cooper City, and though he loves coffee culture, he never expected Ella to take off the way it did. Gol is the owner of a production company called J Productions, which focuses on live entertainment. After annual trips to Italy in May with his wife where they’d sip on espresso, the idea to open a café sprung from a vacancy to do the same, leisurely, stateside.
“What happens here is people grab a coffee and they go off. I can’t stand having coffee in a paper or Styrofoam cup. It makes me cringe. You lose all the quality of what you’re drinking,” Gol said. “The sense of sitting for a minute and enjoying what you’re drinking is really important. So I said, living here in Plantation, I’m going to open a little place and build it the way that I would want to drink coffee.”
And build it, he did. From the bar, to the wooden tables, to even the wood trays with the shop’s logo burned into it, Gol created everything suit.
“Everything is made in house,” Gol said. “We have an amazing roast and a list of flavors that we make here. There are no chemicals.”
Ella Café also offers a not-so-standard non-dairy milk option: macadamia. “We’re the only distributor down here of macadamia nut milk,” Gol said. “That flavor in our coffee is a really delicious blend.”
The Cooper City Ella Café will essentially be a replica if the first, according to Gol. The shop is named after his daughter, who’s now 6-years-old and will occasionally stop by her namesake café for a cookie. The shop is for kids like her, families, adults doing work and anything in between. It’s a gathering place, but it’s also an escape. That’s why Cooper City resident and mother of five, Nicole Torres is such a fan.
“I promised myself that once in a while, I would take time for myself,” Torres said. “Ella Café coming closer to home makes it the perfect spot to have that ‘me time.’” The health and fitness coach also plans to use the spot for meetings and hanging out with her girlfriends. from scratch.
ebloch@sun-sentinel.com The recipes followed