Coming soon to Ghent: Town Center Cold Pressed opening new coffee cocktail bar and tapas spot
Source: The Virginian Pilot; February 19, 2019
Town Center Cold Pressed will be opening a new “brew bar and lounge” this spring at 717 W. 21st St. in Norfolk’s Ghent neighborhood.
This will be the local coffee chain’s fourth spot in Hampton Roads.
In coffee, “brew bar” usually just means an artisan coffee station focused on the craft of brewing, with fancy pourover coffees and vacuum tubes and aeropress espressos — a bit like Cold Pressed’s flagship location in Town Center.
This time, Cold Pressed is putting the emphasis on “bar.”
“It’s going to be a roastery and a brew bar and a cocktail lounge, all in one spot,” says Brenda Jolly, the roaster at Cold Pressed. “It’s not a place for morning coffee. We won’t open till 5—we’ll have decaf for people who don’t want caffeine at night.”
Jolly is co-owner of the newly formed TCCP Roasting company, a partnership between her former Jolly Roasting Company and Town Center Cold Pressed coffee and juice shops.
The coffee and cocktail bar, slated to open this spring, will also feature TCCP’s new Probat coffee roasting machine from Germany — a roasting setup Jolly believes will be one of the most sophisticated in Hampton Roads. The stack of that roaster will be visible from the cafe and bar.
The room will be equally fancy, says Jolly, inspired in part by the urban cafes of Nashville and a cafe called The Roastery in Tokyo, where she and her husband Casey used to live. Casey is also a partner in TCCP Roasting, alongside the Town Center Cold Pressed founders.
“It’s hard to put into words: very nice, swanky to me. The space is insane—it’s beautiful,” Jolly says.
The menu will be a host of caffeinated (or decaf) cocktails making use of TCCP’s house-roasted coffee, and cocktails that use Cold Pressed’s juice. The food menu will be an eclectic menu of small plates.
One such cocktail will use cascara — the outer shell of the coffee bean — alongside cucumber and gin and St. Germain liqueur.
“The idea is playful sophistication,” Jolly says. “We want to have fun with what we’re offering, offer something new.”
Jolly says that the new brew bar and roastery is part of an overall expansion of Cold Pressed’s coffee offerings, which she hopes to expand to include direct relationships with coffee farmers. She said the company also plans to support nonprofits with its drinks.
“The idea would be you can get a 9- or 10- or 11-dollar cocktail that has a certain kind of coffee in it, and then the beverage would support a kid going to school.”