People who like good coffee are often the kind of people who like good wine and cocktails. That was the thinking behind cousins Seth Cook and Chris Brown’s first restaurant, Takoma Beverage Company, which opened Sunday. The shop serves up coffee and pastries in the mornings, then transitions to cocktails, beer, and wine in the afternoon and evenings. A full food menu, ranging from avocado toast with a poached egg to a crispy pork belly, is available throughout the day.
While Cook, the former coffee director at Northside Social, is the brains behind the morning menu of espresso drinks and pour-overs, Brown brings a world traveler’s approach to food. Beyond visiting 25 different countries and 40 U.S. states in his lifetime, Brown worked as an agricultural extension officer in Tanzania while in the Peace Corps. During his time there, he gained an appreciation for organic farming and fresh vegetables, which is reflected on the the veggie-heavy menu.
For Cook, the important thing about the menu was that each product have a story—whether it’s the coffee beans passed directly from the farmer in Ethiopia to his shop in Takoma, or it’s kale from a local farm ten miles away used in the shop’s version of a Caesar salad.
While the menu highlights local products for food (designed by chef Liam LaCivita of Bar Civita) and pastries (from bakery Souk), Cook and Brown sourced most of their beverages internationally—“just to make sure we had the best and most beautiful examples out there of each drink we were serving,” Cook says. To do so, he brought on sommelier Sonja Eberly, mixologist Tim Higgins, and beer expert Drew Lemberg to hand-select options for the drink menu, like the pinot noir from New Zealand and the pilsner from the Czech Republic.
Overall, the drinks menu is purposefully short because Cook plans to change it up often. Expect three draft beers, four wines, and eight cocktails, including several summery drinks like the “Rose of Mary” (gin, lime, rosemary, honey, and sparkling water) and the “After the War” (gin, Aperol, orange juice, simple syrup, and Angostura bitters).
Counter Culture supplies the shop’s coffee. Beyond the lattés and espressos, the storefront will soon sell retail bags of the roaster’s beans, coffee brewing equipment, tea bags from Rishi, and even alcohol.
As of now, the Takoma Beverage Company shop is pretty small. The narrow set-up fits only the bar and a few tables lined against the opposite wall and window. But at the end of the month, the shop will expand into the next-door unit when the current tenant, vintage clothing store PollySue’s, relocates down the street. By August, the additional area will be home to a long communal table that will double as an after-hours events space. Coming up first are free coffee cuppings and classes led by Cook.
The events fit into the owners’ vision for the shop to be something more than a place where you do work on your laptop or grab a cappuccino to-go. On the tentative events docket is a social awareness program to recognize Ugandan NGO, Grassroots Reconciliation Group, founded by artist, Sasha Lezhnev, whose photographs line the shop’s walls.
Former editorial fellow Erica Sloan is now an editorial assistant at Martha Stewart Weddings and Martha Stewart Living.
