Near sunset on a Tuesday in the middle of May, Lana Labermeier and her husband Stuart Davenport were sitting outside their then-unfinished new Bloomingdale coffee shop, Big Bear Cafe, enjoying a hard earned cold beer after a long day of landscaping work. Unfortunately, their neighbors could hardly let them rest.
“When are you gonna be open?” shouted one man from his car. “Are you hiring?” asked another. “What’s this going to be?” “Aren’t you open yet?” At least eight different people from the neighborhood stopped to inquire about the status of the cafe in the space of an hour. “It’s like this all the time,” Labermeier explained.
Officially launching tomorrow after a soft opening that began a few weeks ago, Big Bear has caused quite a stir since the day renovations began at its location at 1st and R Streets NW — not so much because the couple has invented something brand new (it is a coffee shop after all) — but because the largely residential Bloomingdale neighborhood (or Eckington, depending on who you ask around here) has apparently been starving for retail services for some time. Until recently, the only other businesses nearby were a few Chinese fast food restaurants, a liquor store, and the tiny Windows grocery store. Now that Big Bear is open and the brand new Bloomingdale Farmers’ Market (also the brainchild of the couple, who live a few doors down from the cafe, and Davenport is the local ANC 5C03 commissioner) is running on Sundays across the street, suddenly other businesses are opening in the vicinity you might not have imagined would pop up here — like The P Spot, a new fitness studio offering “strip aerobics” and more.
The mood surrounding the the birth of the new coffee shop seems to be infectious. Jody Clark, who lives around the corner and is working part-time at Big Bear, can be overheard telling curious new customers about how much she loves living in the area. “Until the coffee shop opened up I didn’t know any of my neighbors,” Clark said. “I only wanted to work here so I could finally meet people.”
Big Bear Cafe is located at 1700 1st St. NW. Stop by on Saturday for their official opening day celebration, where there will be a pastry tasting with samples from Hawthorne Fine Breakfast Pastry at 10 a.m., and a single origin coffee tasting beginning at 2:30 p.m. Whole bean coffees and T-shirts will also be for sale.
