Ronald and Tamir Bailey have been running this establishment for 19 years and are just as excited about the place as if it opened yesterday.
“We love doing this because we have a passion for it,” Tamir Bailey says. “We’ve been doing this for a long time and it’s pretty fun. When it’s your passion, it makes a big difference.”
She added that people come to the bar for food. She is proud of the patio, which they beautified this year.
“My philosophy is that what our customers are buying is a great experience, and if they don’t get that, then I’m disappointed we didn’t provide it,” says owner Chris Schiller. “We try to ensure that we offer the best beer, the best food from our scratch kitchen and the best experience. That includes entertainment and an excellent staff who really enjoy their jobs and who treat our customers like family.”
Besides a list of favorite craft brews that are always available, Schiller says they rotate their offerings and create new ones so there’s a variety.
“We sit down about once a week to plan what new beers to make,” he says. “We watch trends and talk about flavors that are big like our Forklift Training: Lemon Square Inspired Pastry Sour and throw ideas around, like how about tiramisu?”
“We wanted to open the ‘Cheers’ of coffee shops,” says Skyler LaHood who bought what was Pekoe & Bean this year with her husband, Brad LaHood, and sister-in-law Britt Johnson. “We don’t drink alcohol, and so serving coffee made sense.”
Besides an ever changing variety of specialty coffees, they serve beverages including tea as well as breakfast, lunch and sweets.
The ambience they created is “raddest,” meaning very cool, but they also wanted to keep it friendly.
“So many coffee shops have an industrial look and feel now days, and we didn’t want that,” says LaHood. “We wanted a place where you go and know the people working there, a neighborhood place where people could spend time and is fun and comfortable.Being voted best makes me feel like we got that, and I thank our staff and our customers for making us a success—it’s quite an honor.”
“We wanted something besides a coffee option to offer our customers,” says Jesenia Rivera, whose passion for creating fruit drinks at home led her to open The Scoop in 2021. “So we created our fresh juice list to have a variety of drinks that we can make from the fresh fruits and vegetables we have on display.”
Best selling items include Morning Fuel, a blend of carrots, oranges, lemon, apples, beets and spinach, and the Orange Dream, a mix of oranges, carrots and pineapples.
“People can customize our drinks, too, by adding what they want,” Rivera says, noting its menu changes seasonally. “We also have a GTL shot—ginger, turmeric, and lemon that can be added to drinks or taken as is.”
