I write this today, Spring of 2021, as a quick update on a few items that have been front and center for our team at Good Coffee over the last couple of months. Much time has passed since we wrote in June of 2020 and what a year it has been! Like you, we have traveled a challenging and formational path over the course of the last months and I feel grateful today to be writing about some efforts we’re undertaking to continue to unfold our world of hospitality back into your world as a guest and friend.
The most pressing thing we’re excited to share with you is that tomorrow (Tuesday, Mar 30th) we will be reopening our project at the Woodlark Hotel! This project, which we refer to as ‘Good at the Woodlark,’ is a collaborative effort between our team at Good Coffee and Holler Hospitality (owned and operated by our good friends Jen Quist and Doug Adams.) In recent months our team began to work once again in partnership with Holler Hospitality to re-launch our lovely downtown cafe, located at the intersection of Park Ave and SW Alder Street. I can say that this is an incredibly special reopening for us due to the cafe, along with the beautiful Woodlark Hotel, having been closed since the beginning of the pandemic. For 12 months we dearly missed using this location to provide hospitality for our city and are quite beside ourselves to be back to work once again. The team who chose to work with the Holler x Good Coffee partnership are amazing, talented and fun. We can’t wait for you to meet them!
Which brings me to the second thing we are excited to share regarding this upcoming reopening. This location will be the first location we operate under a hybrid seated + take-out model. What does this mean? This means that we will continue to offer a fast, safe, one way traffic model for grabbing your coffee to-go. You’ve become familiar with this model at our other locations. This also means that a certain portion of the lobby at the Woodlark Hotel will be safely seated, and sanitized as an option for you if you would like to enjoy your coffee inside, catch up on some work or meet a friend for a chat.
Why a hybrid model at the Woodlark Hotel and not our other locations? That’s a great question and the answer really comes down to one thing. It is our commitment to only operate hybrid models in our cafes when we can do so in a way that gives our to-go guests a way to access product in a safe flow built for throughput, our staff the space and resources necessary to stay safe as they serve both for here and to-go customers, and seated environments that make our for hear customers feel safe about spending time with us. At Woodlark, frankly we have both the space (and resources as a result of the hotel partnership) to be able to do this earlier than our other stores. It’s my assumption, due to the small footprint of our other cafes, that a number of other factors will need to change prior to moving to a hybrid model across our entire portfolio. These things would be a combination of much higher (allowed) occupancy rates, along with a vaccination rate coinciding with people being in clos(er) proximity to each other. We’re not there yet - but every step forward is a step towards being able to serve people in ways we have dearly missed throughout these last 12 months of sacrifice.
Thanks for tuning into these announcements we’ve so looked forward to sharing with you. We’ll see you at the Woodlark… starting tomorrow!
From all of us to all of you! Talk soon!
