PLACEMAKING | Coffee and Community
A trio of downtown cafés demonstrates the power of caring about more than just commerce.
Written By Satchel Walton
This is the third installment of a three-part series on Southern entrepreneurs catalyzing place through restaurants, retail, and rejuvenation.
After emerging as bikeCOFFEE, a sort of a truckless food truck, the duo behind Cocoa Cinnamon ran a Kickstarter to help move it into a brick-and-mortar location. For customers who had supported bikeCOFFEE, the fundraiser provided a real sense of being invested in the budding company’s success. It was a fitting way for Cocoa Cinnamon to start, because from the beginning, it has always been more than just a business.
“Building relationships, whether it is with vendors, team members, guests and the wider community is about working hard, dignifying people, being honest, and doing it day in and out to build trust,” Leon Grodski Barrera wrote in an email. “If your heart and work is in the right place, people will gravitate to you and support you.”
Today, he and Areli Barrera de Grodski operate three locations across Durham, North Carolina. They’ve also started roasting coffee in-house, with their award-winning Little Waves Coffee Roasters.
Despite the global connections necessary to the roasting business, Cocoa Cinnamon just doesn’t have the same feel as coffee shops that could be plopped down anywhere in the world—or at least anywhere in decently affluent urban American neighborhoods. It’s a staple of the place it’s rooted in, and that’s by design.
“The word ‘community’ can be used lightly and in a coded way. We are interested in it in a way that is complex, nuanced, imperfect, one that takes work and is about building trust and connecting with folks through time,” Grodski Barrera wrote.
Its first location came to life in a former garage on West Geer Street. At the time, it was one of the only businesses in the area, and it offered people a place to gather and connect. Over time, that same neighborhood has become increasingly well off—some would say gentrified. As a result, some tensions in Cocoa Cinnamon’s model of being part of a community were inevitable. Which “community” does a coffee shop serve? But persistence in building ties and Areli’s Latina heritage allowed the couple to move toward the goal of serving everyone.
“The core values, the enactment of them, and ongoing work to bring the real closer to the idea aren’t separate from the business plan. They drive it and are key to success,” according to Grodski Barrera.
Leon and Areli’s commitment to people can be seen across different facets of their business. For instance, their deep connections in Durham helped them keep their whole workforce employed throughout the pandemic. Their relationships with coffee growers also let them build a sustainable and humane supply chain: They’ve recently worked with farmers they buy from to help them with loans.
We have seen it throughout this series, including in profiles of PRESS Coffee+Crepes+Cocktails in Graham and Durham, North Carolina, and Marsh Collective in Opelika, Alabama: The best people to build up these things we call “communities” are regular citizens who are connected to the places where they live and work. This is not to say that policy decisions are unimportant or that one individual can easily change the entire world. No mere mortal can alone take up the Herculean task of making the South a walkable and inclusive and just urbanist utopia. But normal folk can become small business owners and builders who actively and deliberately construct the world they want to see around them. As individuals, we can learn from them, and policymakers would do well to encourage them. Cheers to the hard but meaningful work that goes on at Cocoa Cinnamon—and at similar ventures across the South.
Satchel Walton is the Southern Urbanism Mencken Publishing Fellow on Urban Development.