Run of the mill they’re not
Several area coffeehouse take some unusual — and very tasty — approaches
Coffee drinkers of the world, the USDA expects you’ll drink a record amount of coffee in 2017-’18. Is it any wonder there seems to be a new cafe wherever you look? ❚ There must be a coffeehouse/ cafe/tasting room to match every mood, interest or need. At several that opened in the past year or so, customers can feed an interest in Mexico, feed bellies with well-crafted plates (including an occasional Saturday night burger), or nourish their inner coffee geeks with precise pours or cold brew.
Valentine Cafe Oak Creek
At the tiny tasting room attached to Valentine’s roasting facility on Milwaukee’s west side, the emphasis is on the coffee, brewed precisely by the cup using the pour-over method; food is mainly pastries to go with your coffee.
Valentine’s Oak Creek cafe is an altogether different experience. In this airy, glassy, two-story cafe in Drexel Town Center, food is a draw, too. In fact, the burger that’s an occasional Saturday night special ($12) is one of the best around, hands down. It’s deeply beefy and juicy.
Chef Bruce Badke, who previously cooked at the cocktail lounge Distil in downtown Milwaukee, assembles plates to share over a drink, too, like a board featuring Wisconsin cheeses ($14) or rich artichoke dip ($9). The cafe stocks craft beer and an appealing list of wines (both of Valentine’s owners worked in the wine industry).
The cafe has fresh, vibrant salads, like a version of fattoush ($7), the Middle Eastern bread-and-greens salad, and hearty sandwiches, such as thinsliced flank steak with horseradish sauce and caramelized onions ($10) and pan bagnat ($9), olive-oil-packed tuna with a Mediterranean mix of roasted red peppers, artichoke, thin green beans, basil and kalamata olives.
Breakfast is solid, too, with options that include a burrito stuffed with eggs, cheese and poblano pepper ($8) or the Sconnie ($8), a breakfast sandwich made with a bratwurst patty, fried egg and aged cheddar.
The cafe is different from other coffeehouses in that it has table service; seat yourself, but a server will take your order. You can order at the counter if you’d rather, and have your food and drink brought to you. Coffee here is brewed by the batch (plus espresso and espresso drinks); you’ll have to hit the west-side tasting room if you want to try a pour-over Valentine coffee.
Expect to find more grab-and-go sandwiches and soups sometime in April for customers in a hurry, and an expanded brunch menu for the weekends in late spring or early summer.
Hours: 6 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 6 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday, 7 a.m.-10 p.m. Saturday, 7 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday; breakfast served until 11 a.m. daily. 7981 S. 6th St., Oak Creek, in Drexel Town Center. (414) 405-2280. ca fe. valentine coffee co. com
Pilcrow Coffee
As he describes it, Ryan Hoban, the owner of Pilcrow, “went down the rabbit hole of coffee,” starting with sugary lattes and trying it all before ending up at individually brewed cups of singleestate coffees and cold brew on nitro, his company’s calling card.
He used to work cleaning windows from his Danish cargo bike in Chicago; the coffee roaster/cafe he used as his office ended up hiring him after he proposed selling cold-brewed coffee, made creamy with nitrogen, from a cargo bike. When he saw how popular the coldbrew was with customers, he returned north of the border to start his own business.
Hoban named his company for the paragraph symbol found on rough drafts because he wants Pilcrow to be part of coffee’s story, he said, but in a supporting role. The focus is the farmers in Kenya, Guatemala and Burundi who supply Pilcrow’s beans.
MIlwaukee’s newest roaster began operations in early 2017; when the 12seat tasting room opened, it kept limited hours on weekends only. Now it’s open five days a week, with a full house on the weekends.
It’s a microroaster, really; Pilcrow roasts 800 pounds of coffee a week; Milwaukee’s big coffee companies roast thousands of pounds weekly.
The tasting room, across the street from the statue of the Rev. Martin Luther King on King Drive, is stylish: cleanly designed and bathed in white, like the coffee laboratory it is. The white and Cream City brick are punched up with red — at the door, on the shelves — to grab your eye the way the coffee is meant to grab you, too.
Notice the attention to detail: A little ledge holds your to-go coffee for you while you open the door. If you stay to drink your coffee, the cup is presented on a white ceramic tray and, if you partake, with your own little pitcher of cream.
But any mention of Pilcrow has to include its cold-brewed coffee on nitro, what Homan calls Pilcrow’s core.
The young coffee company got off to a roaring start when it won a national competition — when it was only a couple of months old — for its cold brew.
The nitro cold brew is one of four cold beverages on draft, along with the Sweet and Creamy, an iced-latte-like sweet version made with oat milk, and two kinds of tea. Customers can try them all in a flight of 5-ounce pours.
The tea is a matter of experimentation. Lately, one has been a citrusy sport tea balanced with hops; the second combines ginger and turmeric. There might be a chai club now and again, chai with effervescence. It’s almost like a soda float, Hoban said.
“We basically just mess around, and if we like it, we put it on tap,” he said.
Which sounds very fun-and-games, but this is a place for serious coffee drinkers, where hot coffees are brewed by the cup to bring out the best in the beans.
There is no menu. “We kind of engage the person walking in about what they like, and go from there,” Hoban said.
Nor is there a profusion of flavored syrups, just simple syrup to sweeten a latte, say, to let the flavor of the coffee shine through.
Pilcrow sells coffee and tea only; weekdays, you won’t find sweets for breakfast or sandwiches for lunch. On the weekends, the owner of Hatched pies sells hand pies with the flakiest, butteriest crust imaginable.
Someday, Hoban said, Pilcrow will open another cafe, one with the food, Wi-fi and work space some customers look for. In the meantime, Pilcrow and its cold brew will head to more farmers markets this summer on its red bicycles, including Whitefish Bay, Wauwatosa, Shorewood and Waukesha.
Hours: 8 a.m.-2 p.m. WednesdaySunday; Hatched pies pop-up Saturdays-Sundays until sold out. 1739 N. King Drive. (262) 422-6226. pilcrow coffee.com/tasting-room
La Finca Coffeehouse
La Finca means the farm in Spanish, which is where the idea for this cafe has its roots — on a coffee farm in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.
Sisters Janeth and Lizeth Zorrilla traveled to Mexico for the first time a few years ago to visit family on their father’s side. They arrived at their grandfather’s coffee farm after what Janeth described as a six-hour, mountainous trek from Oaxaca City.
“It was breathtaking,” she said. The view, the feeling, the time spent talking with loved ones over a cup of coffee.
“We wanted to bring a little of that back,” Janeth said, and the sisters decided to open their coffeehouse in St. Francis, in a spacious and light-filled room that had been Fixx cafe.
The sisters import the green coffee beans from the farm and have them roasted at Anodyne in Walker’s Point for coffee and espresso. The rich coffee, served in hand-painted cups from Mexico, is brewed in batches, but customers can order it brewed by the cup, an offmenu option. Or they can order coffee infused with cinnamon, or the Oaxaca, steeped with a sachet of cloves, star anise and cinnamon, a spin on Mexico’s cafe de olla.
“It just changes the flavor ever so slightly,” Janeth said. “The aromatic bouquet is amazing.”
La Finca serves espresso drinks with flavors like tres leches, named for the cake made with three kinds of milk, and horchata, incorporating spiced rice milk made at the cafe. And it makes a superior hot chocolate with cinnamon, cayenne and the Mexican chocolate brand Abuelita.
At the counter are sweets and pastries including cheesecake flan and empanadas with fillings such as guava or pumpkin.
The cafe makes breakfast and lunch sandwiches and molletes, black beans, cheese, crema and pico de gallo on toasted bread.
The sisters gave the spacious, sunny room the feel of Mexico, with plenty of lush plants and a couple of wooden adornments that suggest pergolas. There’s plenty of room for chatting friends, laptop-bearing workers or romping children. Works by local crafters and artists are on display, as are handmade goods from Mexico, all for sale.
A patio, with a view of a sliver of Lake Michigan, is in the works for summer, and the sisters have other plans: opening a drive-through in May, adding vegan and gluten-free plates, expanding hours for summer and, ultimately, trying their hand at roasting and building a wholesale business for their grandfather’s coffee, so the sisters can “share it with a lot more people,” Janeth said.
Hours: 7 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday, 7 a.m.-7 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. 3558 E. Sivyer Ave., St. Francis, off S. Packard Ave. near S. Lake Drive. (414) 394-0722. lafinca.cafe