The roasting company’s second Boston-area café has combined an evening-friendly menu of workman popcorn and booze.
Gracenote Coffee Wine has transposed Intrepid Café on First Street in Cambridge. / Photo by Patrick Barter
More than 4 years after debuting a station room-only coffee shop in downtown Boston, Gracenote Coffee Roasters has a new plcae where we can indeed have a chair to suffer your espresso—and afterwards stay a while, to follow it adult with a potion of an Italian red or French white. Gracenote Coffee Wine opened Saturday, Feb. 29, during 150 First St. in Cambridge. It’s a second café for a Massachusetts coffee-roasting company; and it’s a company’s initial veteran incursion into a universe of wine.
Gracenote Coffee Wine serves a fluent roasts as pour-overs and in espresso drinks, and also offers cold drinks and baked products from Danish Pastry House by day. To span with a beer, wine, and cordials permit during a Cambridge café, it also offers a singular menu of Rancho Gordo popcorns, hand-cranked to sequence in Whirley Pop poppers.
Gracenote owners and owners Patrick Barter and a roasting company’s longtime “vibe ambassador,” Drew Korby, are operative together to curate a preference of especially healthy wines, as good as name qualification drink and cordials. Both group have “a timeless personal interest” in wine, says Barter, who started his coffee-roasting company in 2012 on his former front porch in Berlin, Mass. He has given finished some grave booze training with a Wine Spirit Education Trust.
Wine, like coffee, is “an locus [in which] people also speak about terroir, processing, variety, and how intentionality combines with healthy variations year-to-year,” Barter says. “We’ve been doing a coffee thing for a while, and now we’re doing a booze thing.”
Photo by Patrick Barter
At right, Drew Korby bonds bags of creatively roasted coffee beans during Gracenote Coffee Wine. / Photos by Ashley Clements
Gracenote is a latest coffeeshop to get into “the booze thing.” A few blocks divided in East Cambridge, Curio Coffee pops bottles Thursday-Saturday evenings, and swaps a morning-friendly waffle menu for snacks like olive tapenade-crostini. Gray’s Hall is a full-on booze bar with shareable fare from former Tasting Counter cook Marcos Sanchez and a owners of South Boston’s dear bottle emporium and deli, American Provisions. And Salem-based coffee roaster, Jaho, serves booze and some-more during a few of a cafés, including in Downtown Crossing and the Back Bay.
But opening a Cambridge café and booze bar in 2020 wasn’t indispensably a devise for Best of Boston-worthy Gracenote, that is also readying a new café for a forthcoming downtown food hall, High Street Place. The event to enhance opposite a stream stems from Gracenote’s attribute with a former Intrepid Café, that non-stop in 2017, as an prolongation of a record company, Intrepid.
“We had worked with Intrepid as a indiscriminate partner given a café’s inception. We were concerned as early as a architectural plans,” Barter says. Woodworker Ryder Naymik, who is also a operations manager of Gracenote’s Upton-based coffee-roasting company, built a strange Cambridge café’s bar and tables, he adds. Intrepid “wanted to pierce on in terms of their focus,” Barter continues. “I offering to fundamentally pierce into a space,” that was already versed with a beer, wine, and cordials license.
The menus are staid to grow, and will frequently change, Barter says. The preference of wines will always underline “expressive” juices from opposite a spectrum, he says. To start, drink fans can select between a classical German kellerbier from Grevensteiner, or a Cat’s Meow IPA from Exhibit ‘A’ Brewing Company. There is also Stormalong Cider’s hibiscus-bolstered Red Skies during Night for a cider option. Gracenote has so distant stocked usually one liqueur: a barrel-aged solitaire from Barr Hill, that Barter says creates a tasty solitaire and tonic—as good as an espresso tonic cocktail.
“We aren’t staring with a dash in considerate arena,” he notes, though eventually, Gracenote skeleton to offer some-more amari and other “interesting, exciting, and nuanced” spirits that approve with a cordials license.
While a new Gracenote café has a identical vibe to a Boston original, interjection to a wall of windows vouchsafing in healthy light, and plenty use of ethereal white space, dim woods, and greenery, it has some pivotal differences. For one, it has 20 seats, including some bar-height chairs and unchanging tables—and it also has a open restroom. Eventually, Barter skeleton to adorn a place with photos of craftspeople during work, like his and Naymik’s mentor, Dan Weaver of Maine Kiln Works. Weaver not usually crafted all of a ceramics in use during Gracenote’s cafés, though he also assembled a pleasing live-edge coffee bar during a Boston location.
Weaver’s change is “why both [Ryder and I] do things in that we make things and caring about how it turns out,” Barter says. “You know it when we see it: Like, ‘that thing is unequivocally good,’ or ‘this thing tastes unequivocally good.’ The ‘really good’ partial is a puzzling multiple of elements that are usually right. At Gracenote, we concentration on a ‘just right.’”
Gracenote Coffee Wine is conveniently situated opposite a travel from top-shelf ice cream builder Toscanini’s, and is located on a same retard as dining options including Shabu Mein and Boca Grande. It’s now open from 7 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday-Friday, and from 9 a.m.-7 p.m. on Saturdays. Eventually, it will supplement Sundays and dusk hours until 10 p.m. Alcohol use starts during noon.
Gracenote Coffee Wine, 150 First St., Cambridge, gracenotecoffee.com.