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Coffee and pastries from Cafe & Sabor
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Owner Diego Salazar talks with a guest at Cafe & Sabor’s original location on Hull Street Road.
A whining, high-pitched whistle, then pop! Pop! Pop! It’s a party of sorts at Cafe & Sabor. The pinging and popping of balloons is how city inspectors test the fire suppression system inside the stove hood at the cafe’s final inspection. The new coffee shop and restaurant at 7807 W. Broad St. opened over the weekend after owner Diego Salazar worked over a year and a half to build out a former Title Max into a second location of his coffee roaster and Colombian bakery. The original opened in late 2017 near the intersection of Hull Street and Turner roads in North Chesterfield, and Richmond magazine recently named it one of the region’s best restaurants.
“My wife Maria helps me a lot,” Salazar says, recalling Cafe & Sabor’s origins. “We worked in construction, and my wife got up early to make food to sell to the other workers on-site. Everybody said, ‘You should do a restaurant!’ We prayed. God did the rest.”
The tidbits and big bites at Cafe & Sabor are nearly a religious experience, and freshly roasted Arabica beans are ground to order. Artfully poured lattes and warm pastries are morning go-tos for construction workers, who queue up early. To feed them, both cafes open at 6:00 a.m. and close at 9 p.m.
The cafe’s cuisine was developed from recipes the couple learned growing up in mountainous Eje Cafetero, the “coffee axis” of Colombia known for its many coffee farms. “The pan de bono comes from a secret recipe my wife learned when she was 18, from an older Colombian baker. It’s a snack made from cassava flour. If we fry the pan de bono, it becomes a bunuelo — a lightly crispy ball that’s just a touch sweet,” Salazar says, running through the list of treats offered as if describing old friends. “The most popular breakfast to go is empanadas — meat pies. This is our fast food in Colombia. The corn flour shell is stuffed with combinations of chicken, beef and cheese.”
For those dining in, a larger menu is served.
“We grill steak, eggs and shrimp, but my favorite breakfast is arepa,” Salazar says. “We make two styles: everything inside [the corncake] or everything outside. I like eggs, cheese and sweet plantain, with the fillings on the outside. But, the arepa with chorizo and sauces, fillings on the inside, is more popular. And many Asian customers come in for our pork belly arepa. It’s amazing.”
The cheery restaurant with its ketchup red and mustard yellow color scheme appears bustling, even when it’s empty. Above the pastry cases are TVs so guests can catch up on the news or watch a game. Religious messages, such as “All I need is a little bit of coffee and a whole lot of Jesus” are splashed across the room. Crediting God is important to Salazar.
“We’ve always been busy. I had the intention to open, but the success of the [first] restaurant, that’s God,” he says.
Coffee is also king at Cafe & Sabor. “I love coffee all my life,” Salazar says, beaming. “I grew up in the mountains, where 80% of the people work and live on coffee farms. We bring in our beans from Nariño, Colombia, where the elevation is 2,000 feet. You want high elevation. If coffee beans are grown near a volcanic eruption, it will taste good. The soil will be more fertile. I can taste the difference. It’s sweeter. Sometimes there’s a honey flavor. Some people plant lemon trees or cultivate honey around the coffee farms in that volcanic soil.”
Cafe & Sabor, which means, “coffee and flavor,” roasts 160 pounds of coffee weekly for the Hull Street location. For the newly opened West Broad Street store, Salazar has installed a larger roaster. He hopes to be able to sell more beans to customers and eventually develop a wholesale business, stocking the shelves at Publix and Walmart with bags of coffee. But his vision does not end there.
“I’d like to be the Latin Starbucks, with eight locations,” Salazar quips. On his phone, he shows me a map of future locations, not specific buildings, but coordinates marked with Google Maps pins. His eyes light up. He can already hear those balloons popping.
