What makes a good café? The criteria depend on the coffee drinker. Maybe you’re a purist who’s obsessed with direct sourcing of single-origin beans. Maybe you’re a nerd, in which case you’re all about the latest laboratory-like brewing method. Or maybe you prefer a place that serves up sweet and seasonal drinks, with comfy couches upon which to plop and enjoy them.
The latest batch of cafés to open around Chittenden County isn’t fussy. None of them has a pour-over on the menu or a siphon behind the bar. But they all make a good cup of coffee — or tea, if that’s your thing. And alongside the lattes and local pastries, they serve a big dose of charm, from interactive art to stacks of books.
We headed to five spots that opened this year to sip seasonal lattes, dirty sodas, classic espresso drinks and cold-foam chai. At each, we found a bonus element — something beyond the beverages — that helps bring people in.
The Art of Coffee
Artemus Café, 104 Church St., #1A, Burlington
At the newest coffee shop on the Church Street Marketplace, Quigley Lyden juggles the tasks of order taking and coffee making. The barista is also, literally, a juggler: Lyden often performs in front of Artemus Café, using a touch of circus magic to draw customers into the tiny spot.
Once inside, the curious will find more than coffee: Artemus is also home to the Burlington Art Mini Museum. Its 380 square feet — mostly vertical — are covered in paintings, pottery and other pieces from 22 artists, about a third of which are for sale. Prompts on an easel out front encourage customers to express their creative side, such as the recent seasonally apropos directive to “draw something spooky.”
Owner Michael Chase, 31, is a painter himself, and he spent nearly a decade serving in restaurants. With his taller-than-it-is-wide café, which opened in the former Cosmic Grind and Speeder & Earl’s Coffee space in August, he’s bringing a bit of quirk back to Church Street, along with what he calls “the three Cs.”
“We’re all about coffee, community and connection,” Chase said. Two months in, Artemus already feels like it’s been there forever: Objets d’art cover every available surface, giving the place a lived-in look that usually takes decades to accomplish.
I stopped by on a rainy Wednesday and found Lyden rocking out to the It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown soundtrack. I ordered a Miel latte with cinnamon and honey ($7.75, no upcharge for oat milk), which Lyden served with the foam poured into a pumpkin design instead of the standard latte-art leaf. They presented it with a flourish before topping my drink with extra cinnamon and local honey.
I slowly sipped the cozy drink, forgoing one of the three small tables to browse the gallery walls. Sometimes, Chase told me, people come in just to look. While the café technically funds the museum, there’s no purchase necessary — and admission is free.
I’ll go back, for both the coffee and the art. Artemus uses beans from Brio Coffeeworks, and the Burlington roastery’s pros have trained the team well in steaming milk and pulling shots. A small food selection — mostly pastries — includes Haymaker Bun’s brioche buns on the weekend.
In the spring, Chase hopes to add a creemee machine. He’ll also add a bit more indoor seating this winter — whatever will fit.
“It’s all to keep the art going,” Chase said.
Cake and Community
Café Napoli, 163 Cherry St., Burlington
Dante Seguino is both surprised and not at all surprised to find himself the owner of Café Napoli, an Italian-accented coffee bar in his hometown. The 33-year-old grew up hearing stories about his grandfather’s Neapolitan roots and the Italian restaurants his grandparents ran in Maine. In his twenties, Seguino rose from barista to manager of the former Speeder & Earl’s Coffee outpost on Church Street (now home to Artemus Café) and then worked at Burlington’s Trattoria Delia. Hospitality was “part of the character of all the people in my life,” he said.
But Seguino never imagined he’d become a small business owner. “My mom’s a Marxist economist,” he said with a grin. “I called them ‘small business tyrants’ when I was growing up.”
Still, when Seguino decided to open a café on Cherry Street in the space most recently occupied by the Lucky You dispensary, his mom, retired University of Vermont professor Stephanie Seguino, was all in. Since Napoli’s Memorial Day weekend opening, Stephanie has contributed cakes baked in her inspected home kitchen. These include a tender, zesty orange-almond-olive oil cake ($4.50 per slice), which happens to be gluten and dairy-free; a gluten-free lemon-pistachio cake ($5.50 per slice); and an apple-yogurt cake ($3.50). Other baked goods come from nearby Belleville Bakery & Catering.
Coffee drinks, such as the perfect foam-dolloped macchiato ($4) I had on a recent visit, are skillfully pulled on a high-end, Italian-made La Marzocco machine and brewed with beans from Montgomery’s Big Jay Roasting. Among non-caffeinated options, Napoli offers dirty sodas — a concoction featured on Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” — made with soda, flavored syrup and heavy cream.
Instead of soda, the café uses plain seltzer. Dante recommended his favorite bitter orange and coconut syrup blend ($5 for 12 ounces) and explained he’s no bandwagon fan: He was first introduced to dirty sodas about a decade ago by Mormons he met at wilderness therapy camp in Utah. “They helped me at a difficult time of my life,” he said.
Dante aims to support young people in his own way. He fondly remembers spending lots of time as a teen at the long-gone 242 Main and downtown mall. He hopes his café, with its hang-awhile atmosphere and unlimited Wi-Fi, can “grow into a good little community space.”
Kind Fortune
Clover Café, 510 Shelburne Rd., South Burlington
Clover Café is on my commuting route, but before I saw the lights on inside, I learned that it had opened from TikTok.
The chic, white-tiled café — with pops of shamrock green in the furnishings — appropriately launched on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day. Owned by siblings Amaya and Wolf Baustert, 28 and 30, Clover serves Brio Coffeeworks espresso drinks and local treats from Haymaker Bun, Sweet Alchemy, Krin’s Bakery, Lake Champlain Chocolates, Honeymoon Kitchens and other Vermont businesses.
But the most popular item at Clover is cold foam. In the café’s second week, I saw a social media influencer’s video on TikTok highlighting one of Clover’s iced lattes topped with the smooth, dense cloud of heavy cream, which baristas combine with seasonal flavors and gently whip in a blender. The layered effect looks particularly good online, and “they took off,” Amaya said. “We were shocked.”
“We ran out of so much heavy cream,” she added. “I bought everything they had at Shaw’s and Market 32.”
Cold foam has remained popular ever since, Amaya said. The café offers marshmallow, pumpkin and salted maple flavors for fall. I’m usually a black iced coffee person, but I let myself be influenced and, despite the ubiquity of all things pumpkin spice this time of year, ordered a pumpkin spice chai ($7.50 for small, $8.50 for large).
Made with excellent masala chai concentrate from Fairfax’s Sweet Alchemy, the iced drink, topped with pumpkin cold foam and an extra dusting of autumnal spice, was anything but basic.
Clover’s seasonal drinks aren’t the only thing that’s sweet: At the recommendation of a regular, the café installed a “kindness board” over the summer. The bulletin board is covered with note cards representing drinks or treats purchased by customers for a future recipient, such as “a coffee for someone who lost a pet recently” or “a cold latte for someone who did something brave this week.”
Anyone is welcome to take a card that resonates, Amaya said. And people do, at least a couple of times a day. The board has been so well received that she had to add pushpins to the heavy cream on her online shopping list.
Wake and Bake
Meadow Roast Café, 1 Market Pl., Building 3, Unit 25, Essex, 802-662-5352
Meadow Roast Café owner Toney Edmonds is glad he doesn’t have to get to work at his new coffee shop until 5:30 or 6 a.m. Compared to the many 2 and 3 a.m. starts over his long restaurant career at national chains such as the French-style bakery and café la Madeleine, “That’s sleeping in,” he said.
The day still starts pretty early at Meadow Roast, which opened in late March in the Essex Towne Marketplace off Susie Wilson Road. Rare among local cafés, the small team makes all the pastries in-house daily. Beautifully moist and spiced dark rum-and-pumpkin mini loaves ($5.25) and chunky, chocolate-studded “brookies” (half brownie and half chocolate chip cookie, $3.75) fly out of the case, said Edmonds, 55. The café usually stocks one or two items, such as a lemon-thyme mini loaf ($5.25), made without gluten.
The full kitchen also turns out hot, cooked-to-order breakfasts, such as a substantial breakfast bowl ($9.25) of scrambled eggs, roasted sweet potatoes and cheddar. At lunch, choices include classic sandwiches, salads and a rotation of from-scratch soups and chilis, from vegetarian coconut curry ($7.75) to a hearty meat-and-bean tailgate chili ($8.75). (The latter, Edmonds noted, is quite spicy.)
Due to capacity constraints, the café’s 12 seats are in the darker rear section of the otherwise bright, large-windowed spot. I sat down to a hefty plate of French toast ($9) and found that the very thickly cut Stewart’s Bakery challah could have used a slightly longer soak in its batter. But I drenched it with maple syrup and relished the side of crisp bacon ($4.50), along with Edmonds’ recommendation of a dirty chai ($7 for 16 ounces).
After his years working in national chains, Edmonds delights in the chance to celebrate local connections in his first solo venture. He sources beans from Vermont Artisan Coffee & Tea in Waterbury Center and mugs from Luke Iannuzzi Pottery in Warren. When customers ask if the maple syrup is from Vermont, he often quips, “Isn’t that a law here?”
Perks and Pages
Wild Meadows Books & Café, 27 Market St., Williston, 802-755-5986
Books take up most of the floor space at Wild Meadows Books & Café, but the coffee drinks and food are hardly a postscript. The café brews beans from Mocha Joe’s Roasting in Brattleboro and serves pastries, snacks and a few sandwiches, including a selection made especially for the shop by South Burlington’s Mirabelles Bakery. The drink menu also includes wine and beer, and the café hosts a full calendar of evening events and gatherings.
Susan and Rick Cote, owners of the Williston Observer weekly newspaper, opened Wild Meadows in late June in Finney Crossing shopping center. Susan, 65, knows coffee. She worked for 10 years at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, now Keurig Dr Pepper, and scoured Vermont for the roaster that suited her for Wild Meadows.
“We tasted a lot of really good coffee,” said Rick, 59. Mocha Joe’s, they discovered, wasn’t on the menu at most other Chittenden County cafés.
Wild Meadows emphasizes seasonal drinks infused with syrups, most made in-house from scratch. The early fall menu included a rosemary-cardamom and a salted caramel latte. When I visited, I’d just seen a Wild Meadows Instagram post promoting its London Fog, a tea latte made with lavender syrup, which inspired me to order an iced honey-lavender espresso version with oat milk ($7.25).
My drink wasn’t too syrupy. The flavors were subtle and well balanced — not always the case with specialty lattes, which can sometimes taste more like the enhancements than the coffee. I paired it with an irresistible fall offering: pumpkin bread pudding ($5.50). It was amazingly light and moist, offsetting the squash with cinnamon-spiced sweetness. This treat, whipped up in-house, stood up impressively to the Mirabelles baked goods.
On another recent visit for an evening event, I skipped the caffeine to savor a cold apple cider, topped with a delightful, pillowy foam of slightly sweetened coconut milk and drizzled caramel ($6.75). I plopped onto a couch in the café area, where the comfy furniture and ample tables encourage lingering, sipping and, of course, reading — making the most of Wild Meadows’ coffee-books combo.
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