Roessler-Vigilante outside his pop-up on 17th Street.

Frozen yogurt isn’t much of a morning treat, so any stores offering nothing else are likely to go empty during the morning hours. Coffee, on the other hand, is mostly consumed early on in the day, but opening a coffee shop in D.C. can be an expensive and daunting undertaking.

So why not merge the two? That’s the idea behind Vigilante Coffee, a new coffee shop that opened this week in the space usually used by Mr. Yogato along 17th Street NW in Dupont Circle. The pop-up operation—open only from 7-10 a.m.—allows owner and roaster Chris Roessler-Vigilante to both establish himself in D.C.’s growing coffee scene while avoiding the usual pitfalls that come along with opening a dedicated coffee shop. (Those pitfalls are certainly obvious to Vigilante—Cafe Green, a coffee shop that recently closed due to $130,000 in overdue taxes, is next door.)

Roessler-Vigilante got his start in coffee when his father’s work—he’s a recently retired NCIS officer—took the family to Hawaii. Roessler-Vigilante took a break from his studies at Virginia Tech to work for a coffee farm on the main island, only to return after completing his business degree to pursue the craft on a full-time basis. He eventually landed in D.C.—his family has relocated here—where he roasted his own one-pound batches of Hawaiian coffee and worked as a barista at Sova on H Street NE.

Vigilante is a small operation, serving a few varieties of coffee in the pop-up, selling roasted beans at various farmers’ markets on the weekends and available at restaurants ranging from Room 11 to Smith Commons. Roessler-Vigilante has bigger plans, though—he told us hat he’s part of he Maketto Project, a “next generation Eastern Market” concept for a storefront on H Street NE that’s the brainchild of Erik Bruner-Yang, owner of nearby Toki Underground. He’s also traveling more widely, looking to Colombia and Costa Rica as new sources for his coffee beans.

Until then, though, Roessler-Vigilante and his small staff—which includes his mother Ellen, who this morning stood outside offering free samples of Guatemalan and Hawaiian coffee—are going to try to keep D.C.’s residents caffeinated at their location within Mr. Yogato. It’s certainly not a bad way to start—Blind Dog Cafe, for one, is similarly located within Darnell’s, an existing bar on Florida Avenue and W Street NW that opens at 5 p.m.