Love is in the air this Valentine’s Day weekend at North Fork Roasting Company — and, yes, the aroma of love is the scent of roasting coffee beans.
The charming little roastery on Main Road celebrates its first birthday Feb. 14.
It’s been an incredible year, say partners Jennilee Morris and Jess Dunne. The young entrepreneurs almost can’t believe how their business has blossomed since they welcomed their first customers into their cozy Main Road coffee shop last winter.
“The reception here has been unbelievable, beyond what we could have ever imagined,” says Morris, sitting at the wood dining table at a window in the roastery’s main room Wednesday morning.
Its funky, thrift-shop chic decor offers comfortable couches, a counter with stools, the coffee bar where general manager Bri Paige is making magic, and the wood table and chairs where Morris and Dunne pause for an interview.
“We didn’t expect to become so important to people’s lives,” Morris says. “It’s a special thing, like it’s another home for them.” Besides coffee (and conversation) NoFo-RoCo offers artisanal teas, hot cocoa, homemade marshmallows and a menu of freshly made, locally sourced food for breakfast, lunch and snacks. There’s open mic night on Fridays — a piano sits against one wall, between a colorful refrigerator and a counter with stools. And Saturdays are storytelling nights with “story slam” each week.
The place is a hub of activity on this snowy winter morning. People come in to pick up their favorite cup to go, or to sit and linger in conversation with friends on a couch. A second room, also filled with comfortable furniture, offers a quieter space for reading or chatting.
It’s the kind of place that just invites visitors to “come in and set a spell” — and they do.
“We have people who come in every single day,” Morris said. “They’ve become our friends now.”
Morris and Dunne are all smiles as they look around at the space they’ve created in the 1930s wood-frame house. The place had stood vacant for about 10 years before the two undertook what would be its total transformation.
It was an effort that took them more than a year. Working on a shoestring budget, and with the help of Dunne’s father, they did all the renovations themselves.
“This spot needed a lot of love,” Morris says with a wry smile. Then the two start laughing at an unspoken inside joke.
“It was really kind of nasty,” Dunne explains. In its last life, it had been an optometrist’s office. But the decade of vacancy had taken its toll. “There was no floor in the kitchen,” she says, wide-eyed.
“It was covered in carpet glue,” Morris adds. They both scrunch their noses at the same time at the memory — in a sort of collective “ew” — then laugh.
“I remember telling my parents we’re going to turn this into a coffee shop and they were like why don’t you think about looking for a new space,” Dunne says. “But this was the perfect location, right on the main road.”
“Once we made that decision, we were like it doesn’t matter — nothing’s getting in our way,” Morris says.
They look around the space they’ve created and share memories of finding items of furniture or spending countless hours sanding and finishing the bar — an old piece of barn wood — making their menu board out of an old wood door, doing the tile behind the bar.
“We didn’t really have any money. You get creative when you’re broke,” Morris says.
“Sometimes I look at things and remember what it was like getting them done and say, ‘Man, that sucked,’” Dunne laughs, “but really every single thing we did was exciting.”
It was hard work, but fun and they are clearly pleased with the atmosphere — as are the customers.
But for the self-described coffee geeks, “It’s really all about the beans,” Morris says.
Morris became enthralled with roasting coffee several years ago when she worked at Love Lane Kitchen in Mattituck, where the owner bought a roaster initially as a marketing tool — the aroma of roasting coffee would bring in customers for breakfast, he reasoned.
She starting learning about coffee beans and roasting processes and when her boss sent her to Seattle for a coffee convention, that was it. She was hooked.
“The more you know, you start unraveling something and you want to know more and more,” Morris explains.
Morris bought her own small roaster, set it up in her garage and began producing batches of her own beans. Soon she was selling them wholesale.
Then opportunity knocked in the form of a restaurant for sale in Southold. Morris, who grew up in Shirley, had fallen in love with the North Fork when she started working at Love Lane Kitchen.
“I knew I would never leave this place,” she says.
She bought the Country Kitchen luncheonette — which is directly behind the roastery — changed the name to Bonnie Jean’s, named for her sister, and toiled there for three long years. It was a misfire, she knows in retrospect. She’d changed the name but nothing else about the place and it just wasn’t the right fit. What Morris really wanted was a roastery and coffee shop.
“And this opportunity fell in my lap,” Morris says. “I couldn’t pass it up.”
While running Bonnie Jean’s, Morris met Dunne, a Southold native and pastry chef. Dunne was running her own startup, Ginger Goods.
Though still operating the luncheonette, Morris launched Grace and Grit, an off-premises catering company and Dunne began working as her sous chef. They run the catering business together now and are setting up a shop for it directly across the road from the roasters.
“But it was coffee that brought us together and coffee that keeps us together,” Morris says.
The pair source their green coffee beans from a broker in New Jersey who imports them from all over the world. They sometimes make the trek to New Jersey to haul bags that weigh 150 pounds apiece, rather than have them delivered, just to see everyone there, they say. “They’re coffee geeks like us,” Morris says.
“It’s like being in Disneyland,” Dunne gushes. “It’s fun.”
Dunne, Morris and general manager Paige are planning a trip to Guatemala, where they will live on a coffee farm. Paige will spend a month there, while Dunne and Morris will be there for a week.
“We want to learn what it’s like to grow and harvest the beans,” Dunne explains. Paige is setting up a donation box in the shop, for the collection of clothing and supplies like children’s vitamins, prenatal vitamins and hygiene items to bring to Guatemala.
Dunne happily demonstrates the roasting process, firing up the natural gas-powered roaster that resides in an enclosed porch and, as its chamber heats to 400 degrees, fills the space with the aroma of roasting coffee beans. She’s roasting a batch of Brazilian beans, checking a sampler scoop every 30 seconds or so to test for doneness. The beans start out green and slowly transform into a tawny brown and ultimately the rich chocolate brown color Dunne seeks. The porch, meanwhile, fills with smoke from the roaster before Dunne cracks open some windows. Temperature control is important, she notes. Cold air rushing in as the roast is going on will interfere with the roasting process.
“I’m warning you, you’re going to smell like coffee all day,” Dunne says as the roasting begins.
But if it weren’t for that aroma — and the thought that it might boost business for a small eatery in Mattituck — Morris and Dunne might not be presiding over one of the North Fork’s most popular gathering places today.
“It’s funny how things work out,” Morris says. “I think the town needed a place like this.”
Friends, family and fans spontaneously gathered at the roastery on New Year’s Eve, where they marked the end of a very special year and celebrated the beginning of a new one with stories, music and a toast of Beetlejuice (a NoFo RoCo roast).
“Everyone in here was crying,” Morris recalls.
The roastery is “a platform to do good,” she says. “Our friend Julia just released an album. We get to sell it. Another friend wants to hang her art. We have a space. Another friend puts her flowers out for display. This place gives us a chance to help other people put themselves out there. We try to do that.”
That’s a big part of what makes the North Fork Roasting Company’s atmosphere special to so many people, the young entrepreneurs know. That — and the aroma of love, roasted to perfection.
