It’s 8 p.m. on a Wednesday night, and the Speckled Bird Café is hopping. Every table in the small one-room coffeehouse is occupied, and owner Jonathan Hicks is running between the espresso machine and the kitchen to ensure that everyone is being taken care of. He’s juggling drink orders with making sure the paninis aren’t burning. The carrot cake sold out more than an hour ago, and the café’s supply of pie is dangerously low. Hicks is thrilled.
The amazing thing is, this café’s not easy to find. Occupying the first floor of a dual-use building in West Norwood, the Speckled Bird is surrounded by residential sprawl for blocks. Moreover, part of the café’s street is one-way in the wrong direction from Montgomery Road. If you want to enjoy what Hicks and company are serving up, you better know where you’re going.
Despite that, the community around the Speckled Bird has chosen to make the café a destination, bringing people of diverse backgrounds and interests together to network and enjoy common loves: good music, good atmosphere and a good cup of coffee. The Speckled Bird provides all in equal measure. But it took a while to become its own community, Hicks says.
“If we had been smart, we would have opened by the mall,” Hicks jokes.
Hicks and his wife Jill opened the Speckled Bird a little more than a year ago, thinking it would be a great way to relax and provide hospitality to their neighbors. They were only half-right. With three children and a contracting business, running a café takes up any spare time the Hicks might have had.
“We wouldn’t have done it if we realized how hard it is,” says Hicks. “We just decided that if we got to the end of our lives and we didn’t do this, it would be something we wish we had.”
When the Hicks opened the Speckled Bird Café, they became a part of a growing community: independent Cincinnati coffeehouses with the common goals of providing quality coffee and creating centers of community with broad appeal. Fair-trade coffee -- often organic -- is the staple. In a business environment that encourages the protection of trade secrets with a fervor bordering on paranoia, these coffeehouses have bucked the trend, instead choosing to partner up and share the wealth of knowledge and experience.
ROHS STREET CAFÉ
Trace the origins of this model, and you’ll end up in Clifton Heights at the Rohs Street Café, an expansive coffeehouse occupying the first floor of University Christian Church. Rohs Street is a place for inspiration and the free exchange of ideas, where the desire for social justice meets with the urge to create. The main room of the four-room coffeehouse is lined with bookshelves packed with tomes on spirituality, world religions and theology, but manager Les Stoneham says that all ideas are welcome here. The evidence: Rohs Street is the meeting place for the University of Cincinnati Skeptics, along with a laundry list of community conscious organizations like the Clifton Heights Improvement Association, Clifton Community Cleanup and Citizens on Patrol.
The Rohs Street Café opened in 2003, the brainchild of Stoneham and his friends. The idea was simple: music, social justice, community organizing and art would be the focus, and coffee would serve as the “elixir” around which everything would revolve. Today, it’s working. The Rohs Street Café’s stage hosts live music every night of the weekend, primarily local acts. Rohs Street’s commitment to community is served with every cup of fair-trade coffee.
Why fair trade? The thoughtful Stoneham explains that there’s a lot to consider when purchasing coffee. What are the lifestyles of the people who grow the coffee like? How are they being sustained? Is growing a coffee a benefit to their community, or is it a hindrance to them? If Stoneham concludes that the coffee hurts the people he’s buying it from, he doesn’t buy.
“It’s kind of hypocritical to say we’re doing something great for the local community, but be ignorant to what’s happening in communities where the coffee’s being grown,” Stoneham says. Rohs Street provides a direct market for coffee grown in the community of Santa Maria de Jesus in Guatemala. Stoneham and company are truly thinking globally and acting locally.
Part of that local action is providing for the fledgling coffeehouses around the city. When the Speckled Bird Café was getting started, Stoneham hooked Hicks up with his roaster and equipment suppliers. He’s doing the same for Choices Café in Over the Rhine, along with another coffeehouse in Springfield, Ohio.
“We may not be known as a huge coffee city,” says Stoneham, “but the style of places that are opening is hugely unique.”
TAZA
Before Taza ever opened its doors to the public in Dec. 2007, the Corryville coffeehouse was already a part of this growing independent coffee community. Stoneham provided Taza manager Rose Sweeney with the names of his suppliers, and Sweeney and the Hicks struck a deal in which Sweeney would gain barista experience covering hours at the Speckled Bird and help them with their accounting. In exchange, Hicks put his contracting prowess to work for Taza, installing the coffeehouse’s beautiful concrete countertops. Stoneham and Sweeney coordinate to place orders for things like food and supplies. Both Taza and Rohs Street benefit from the partnership.
It’s all about community at Taza. Sweeney hires people who will make the customers feel at home, no matter who’s walking through the door. She makes Taza’s loft available for groups free of charge during regular business hours. Taza displays art by local artists and features local musicians during weekends.
Sweeney says Taza hopes to do more for the Corryville community. In the works is a plan to provide “Friends on a Mission” mini-grants, giving locals a chance to put their community action ideas to work. Say a student wants to do a beautification project on Short Vine Street, or a business wants to work on a façade project on Jefferson Avenue; Taza will foot the bill for the project. “As long as it benefits this community, we’ll pay for it,” says Sweeney.
For the average customer, Taza’s commitment to community is still obvious. Bulletin boards across from the coffee bar advertise opportunities to get involved in community groups and support local artists and musicians. The décor is warm and inviting, atmosphere welcoming and the conversation lively. Perhaps it’s the diversity of the clientele that makes it so. At one table by the stage on Taza’s lower level, a Tibetan monk engages a UC student in conversation. At a high-top affixed to an exposed-brick wall, three college-age men debate foreign policy.
“I love watching different worlds collide,” Sweeney says. “I can’t even imagine the conversations that are happening.”
Other Soapbox Favorite Coffee Houses:
- Coffee Emporium on Central Parkway
- Kaldi's Coffee House and Bookstore on Main Street
- Lookout Joe in Mount Lookout
- Baba Budan's in Clifton
- Red Tree Art Gallery and Coffee Shop in Oakley
- Awakenings Coffee Co. in Hyde Park
- Sidewinders Coffee Shop in Northside
- Pike Street Press in Covington
- Pleasant Perk in Pleasant Ridge
- Front Porch Coffee in Price Hill
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