Taste Cafe and Bakery has opened a new location on north Main Avenue in Durango where Homeslice used to be located, bringing more coffee and breakfast options to the north part of town.
The coffee shop and bakery at 2915 Main Ave. held a grand opening Saturday after spending almost six years doing business out of a kiosk at 11th Street Station.
The coffee shop also has a kiosk at Lola’s Place, which opened in early 2022.
For owners Mike Clarke and Ayla Owens, the timing felt right to find their own location. Owens said 11th Street Station was a perfect location for starting the business, but having their own space will allow them to expand.
“We just wanted to grow,” Clarke said. “Our first two businesses were within shared spaces and kitchens. So having our own space and making it our own was really important.”
Because the spot was previously occupied by Homeslice, the owners now have access to a fully operational commercial kitchen that has allowed them to offer more breakfast food items such as crepes, pastries and other breakfast foods.
Owens said Saturday’s grand opening was a huge success with customers creating a line out the door. The new location has better visibility and makes the business its own entity compared to being located at 11th Street Station, where the owners shared space with other businesses.
But Clarke and Owens credit 11th Street Station for helping them get their start, saying they would not have been able to do so at their own location.
Owens said customers have expressed a need for another breakfast spot on north Main Avenue, and with the expansion of Taste’s menu, the business could take off.
The former Homeslice location was a perfect fit for Taste Cafe and Bakery.
Owens said she found a posting for the location while waiting to have blood drawn in an emergency room.
“It was kind of a ‘life is short, let's go for it type of thing,’” Owens said.
Peak Food & Beverage, which owns the building, had been looking to fill the spot with a business that would not compete with the dinnertime traffic of Homeslice, which moved to the location formerly held by Bird’s in September.
The two signed the lease for the coffee shop in mid-February.
Clarke and Owens have been thinking about how to utilize an upstairs deck that was added to the building in 2020. One option that came to mind is to allow Timbleberry Smoothie Co. to utilize the space for the summer, but Clarke said there are other aspects of the business the owners want to focus on first.
“We'll miss 11th Street a lot, and it was bittersweet,” Owens said. “But I think we had to make this decision just because we wanted something that was a little bit more spacious.”
tbrown@durangoherald.com
