“We chose the Seraphim because they are very nice for keeping your volume accurate,” Allen says. Four Angels of Brewing: The four Curtis Seraphim brew batches of Onyx’s Sugar Skull batch blend. An array of cocktail ingredients and barwares allow the two baristas at this station to make Onyx’s signature drinks.Ħ. Hot water is supplied by a Marco Über boiler. After brewing, the Kalita Waves, which are set atop built-in scales, are simply set on the counter to drain. Cocktails and Pour-overs: The entire counter at this station is a drain. At peak hours two baristas are on the machine.ĥ. “Conceptually, none of it would end up working” without it, he says. Down Below: Allen believes this café requires the under-counter setup of the Modbar. “We sell like 2,000 macarons every week,” says Allen. Macaron Mania: Customers ordering drinks at the POS are ambushed by a pastry case filled with macaron. In the mornings, they also serve breakfast tacos from a neighboring restaurant.ģ. The Kitchen: Onyx limits their non-pastry food items to quiches and toasts, which are warmed in a Turbochef oven. “If you wanted to recreate anything we make, chances are everything you need is in that display,” says co-owner Jon Allen.Ģ. The Market: The cold case is filled with local items including milk, artisan soda, yogurts, bean-to-bar chocolates, cheese, and even produce. There’s room to plan what the shop will look like, and serve, in two-years’ time. At this new café, there’s room for those things. Onyx creates some of the wildest drinks in coffee and sometimes they require dedicated tools, things that normally don’t have a place in the shop, like blow torches. Jon sees that, but says it solves a problem he had at his other shops. When they did build this long-planned café in a new building in Bentonville, they didn’t hold back. And if that seems too airy, he also says, “It becomes really efficient. There is controlled freedom, and I think that is empowering to the barista,” Jon says. “This gives them more of a sense of artistry and purpose. The barista on espresso would never need to leave her station, and even if a second barista joined the station, they’d never cross one another because they’d each have a grinder with the house blend the barista on pour-overs and iced drinks would have his own grinders, enough to dial in multiple single-origins and the person making batch brews and tea and pouring beer would have their own grinder and bean supply, too. At the new bar, baristas would move along one plane, north and south. “You have to go north, south, east, and west to make a drink, and you bump into everyone else, and you have 180-degree drinks that spill everywhere,” he says, almost as if describing a recurring nightmare. They think there’s a box and someone pushes a button and a latte is made.” With under-counter equipment-a Modbar espresso machine, four Curtis Seraphim brewers, and a Marco Über water boiler-there’s little to block customers’ views.īoth Allens have worked in coffee shops for a long time, and one part of bar design, especially in busy shops, always bothered Jon: baristas up in each other’s spaces. People will order a latte, and they’ve ordered lattes for thirty years, and they don’t know how it’s made. “For people to take coffee seriously, they need to see the work that goes into it. “We wanted to showcase the baristas, almost as a stage,” Jon says. But they knew what did and did not work at their two other cafés, and so they began to plan what they’d do next.įirst, they’d make the space radically open, offering the baristas no place to hide, or, put more positively, they’d give them the chance to perform. They didn’t really even have a plan for a new shop. When Jon and Andrea Allen, the owners of Onyx Coffee Lab in northwest Arkansas, began designing this bar, they didn’t have a building to put it in.
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