By Arthur E. Foulkes
TERRE HAUTE — The Juiced Cafe is back — but with a new flavor.
After being closed for one year, the small business on South Seventh Street will reopen Friday as a coffee shop.
“We’re really rebranding ourselves,” said Abraham LaVoi, general manager of the business, which is just north of Margaret Avenue.
Beginning in October 2007, the Juiced Cafe, owned by the neighboring Kings Highway Tabernacle Church, operated as a breakfast and lunch cafe with an espresso and latte bar. After some initial success, the business was a casualty of the recession last February.
But now the Juiced Cafe is back with the same owners but with new hours and new management. Instead of serving morning and noon customers, the cafe will be open late afternoons and evenings, LaVoi said.
“We’re going for the coffee shop crowd,” he said.
The Juiced Cafe is made up of two rooms with seating for about 20 people. Large, comfortable leather chairs and tables with convenient wall outlets for laptop computers make the atmosphere suitable for people using the Internet, reading or chatting.
“We wanted to make it very friendly for people wanting to take advantage of our free wireless Internet,” LaVoi said.
The initial hours of the Juiced Cafe will be Monday through Saturday, 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. It will specialize in coffee grown in the war-devastated African country of Rwanda.
“This is the best stuff I ever tasted,” said LaVoi, who calls himself a “bit of a coffee snob,” of the cafe’s “Land of a Thousand Hills” coffee. During the shop’s first two days in business, free drinks will be available for anyone becoming a “fan” of the cafe on Facebook, he said.
The shop also will feature pastries as well as smoothies made from fresh and frozen fruit, LaVoi said.
The motto of Land of a Thousand Hills coffee is “drink coffee; do good.” Proceeds from sales of the coffee go to help support war orphans, coffee growers and others in the village of Bukonya, Rwanda.
The Land of a Thousand Hills coffee “really captures who we want to be,” LaVoi said. “It’s a socially-conscious coffee.”
In addition to LaVoi, who is also a staff minister at the tabernacle’s Family Worship Center, the Juiced Cafe at 2939 S. Seventh St. will employ as many as 18 part-time staff.
For more information on the Juiced Cafe, visit the business’s Web site, www.juicedcafe.com.
Arthur Foulkes can be reached at (812) 231-4232 or arthur.foulkes@tribstar.com
