Storyville Coffee Company, founded on Bainbridge Island in 2006 as an online purveyor of a single blend of utterly fresh, mild coffee, will launch its first retail outlet in the Pike Place Market. The shop, the space formerly occupied by Chez Shea, opens to the public on October 1st, but has been hosting invited guests for the past week or so.
The vibe is distinctly non-Starbucks, upscale and minimalist. There's only one kind of coffee, a secret blend of beans from three regions that's smooth and rich. Pastries are baked in-house throughout the day.
Storyville's founder is Jon Phelps, who started an ambitious training program for audio engineers in 1979 called Full Sail University. (Today Full Sail, located in Florida, offers training in the full range of audio and video production, and is owned by a private equity firm.) Phelps returned to the Pacific Northwest 11 years ago.
His co-presidents (and minority stockholders) in the Storyville venture are Jamie Munson, the youthful former executive pastor of Mars Hill Church, currently a writer and motivational speaker; and Kris Rosentrater, a self-described coffee geek who's been running the day-to-day roasting operation on Bainbridge.
The company logo is a boy "flying" a DC3 model airplane. Says Munson, "We believe that Flyboy represents the kid in all of us: The kid with big dreams to change the world, and determined to get there." (The DC3 is also the logo for Full Sail University.)
As for the store itself, it's the first of three planned for Seattle. Next up: the corner of Queen Anne & Boston, formerly occupied by Teacup; and First & Madison. The space in the Market has been finished with enormous care, with gleaming wood, soft leather seats, and burnished copper accents. Clearly aiming for the top of the saturated coffee-shop market, Muson says, "Details matter."
Okay, so two more details:
The only black cloud in Storyville's sky is a four-minute video called "The Truth," produced by Storyville many years ago which purports to excoriate Starbucks coffee as over-roasted and gross. (Some additional details in a five-year-old New York Times article here.) Strangely enough, the video has literally disappeared, Soviet-style, from the internet. Not a trace.
And this. It's likely Phelps never lived in New Orleans, where the Iberville Housing Projects today occupy a notorious red light district known as Storyville, which flourished at the end of the 19th century. James Spader and Jason Robards starred in a 1992 film noir named for and set in the neighborhood. Storyville was also the title of a series of documentaries broadcast last year on the BBC.
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