Friends Roastery Plans Summer Opening Downtown
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Friends Roastery in Salem hopes to bring its brew to downtown by early summer.
Friends Roastery plans to open in its second cafe in the 101 W. Federal St. building most recently occupied by William Leonard’s Extraordinary Gentlemen, its owners announced on their Facebook page Sunday.
Patricia Tinkler, who with her husband, Matt Lynch, owns Friends Roastery, said they have been looking for some time for a second location. “You can’t help but notice there seems to be a change in the downtown,” the North Side native remarked.
Friends Roastery roasts its own coffee and offers specialty teas and pastries and cookies. The café initially looked at opening in Erie Terminal Place but that “just didn’t line up,” she said.
The location where they will open, known as the Peggy Ann building, is a similar “shotgun space” to the 1856 building where the existing Friends Roastery’s is operating “It's a nice dovetail, really,” Tinkler said. The building “is in remarkable shape” and should require little renovation to get up and running, she added. The space will have an “extensive retail section” and seating for 50 to 75 patrons, she said.
“Besides a little bit of touchup work, we’re not going to have to do any major construction,” she said.
Tinkler is optimistic about prospects in Friends’ second location. There are about 500 people working in downtown Salem, where the cafe has operated successfully for a decade, and there are 10 times that in downtown Youngstown, she said.
“I feel pretty good about our odds for success,” she said.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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