From a crack in the sidewalk, a coffee plant struggles up towards the sun. A giant coffee plant, that is.
It's a coffee plant that muralist Daniel Lopez painted across the north wall of the newest — and last — Indaba Coffee location on North Monroe Street.
Indaba gave Lopez his first job in Spokane over a decade ago. Now, he's leaving his mark on what his old boss Bobby Enslow says will be the final brick and mortar location he'll ever open.
"I just turned 40 last December, so it makes you reevaluate what the next 40 years are gonna be focused on," Enslow says.
After he opened his first shop on West Broadway Avenue in 2009, Enslow opened eight other locations in 15 years. Four of them are still open, including Indaba's popular spots in downtown Spokane and Kendall Yards.
But the "financial, spiritual and emotional burden" of expanding physical locations got to be too exhausting, Enslow says. Not to mention that it cut against his core conviction to build hyperlocal gathering places for neighborhoods.
The newest spot in the North Monroe Business District, which Enslow affectionately calls the "world headquarters" of Indaba, is now the brand's central hub, just a few blocks from Enslow's own home. The Monroe location has been open daily from 6 am to 6 pm for weeks now, but an all-day grand opening party is set for Saturday, Sept. 21.
The spacious coffee shop gives Apple store vibes, and it's where guests can try Indaba's most select roasts and food items like bagel sandwiches and pastries from West Central's Made with Love Bakery. It's also the new home of all the company's roasting operations, which Enslow relocated from Spokane Valley.
But in his next chapter of life, Enslow plans to transition from coffee connoisseur to coffee consultant. The new flagship location will provide space for baristas to take Enslow's new certification program or for entrepreneurs to participate in workshops focused on opening coffee shops in their own neighborhoods.
"For me, it's entering into the season of life now where I'm really paying it forward and utilizing my 15 years of experience to empower other people," Enslow says. "I still very much believe in the mission of coffee shops and the vital importance of having community spaces. Through Indaba's history of growth and retraction, it's taught me that being a smaller operation allows you to have more of an impact on the community. You can scale the product, but you can't necessarily scale the community impact."
If this is the last location Enslow is going to open, he's gonna throw one hell of a last hurrah.
The grand opening party is essentially an all-day extravaganza. The party gets going early — like 6 am early. (This is a coffee shop, after all.)
The first hundred customers of the day get a free swag bag. But if you like to sleep in, stop by anytime from 9 am to noon to check out live music, a petting zoo, family-friendly games and tours of the roastery.
Throughout the afternoon, you can snag your favorite Indaba classics featuring housemade lemon vanilla or lavender syrups or the ever-popular butterscotch latte with from-scratch butterscotch syrup.
"The secret way to have it is to ask the barista to add a little black salt," Enslow says. "It takes it from A to A+."
In the evening, Indaba Monroe will invite any and all baristas — experienced or aspiring — to join a latte art competition. Indaba has hosted plenty of latte art competitions before, but this is the first one ever to encourage sabotage, Enslow says.
"We're gonna allow spectators to actually sabotage the competitors, if they pay cash," Enslow says. "It's five bucks to sabotage a competitor. Then we're gonna give the competitors three lifelines that they can only use once each, and they have to spend $10 to use a lifeline."
Ways to sabotage competitors include forcing them to wear beer goggles or making them pour with their nondominant hand. The winners of the competition will win plenty more cash than they're allowed to spend, and all proceeds from the competition will go to Peak 7 Adventures, a faith-based outdoors outfitter that takes disadvantaged kids on leadership-building trips like rafting, climbing or backpacking.
Indaba's new location is also the latest addition to North Monroe, which is one of the newest hot spots for growth in the city. Millenium Northwest, which has also developed land in Kendall Yards and is working on a project in the Garland District, recently completed a four-story, multifamily housing building on the same block as the coffee shop.
This stretch of arterial road north of downtown Spokane has also been improved by neighborhood-minded entrepreneurs like Dave Musser of Bellwether Brewing, Enslow says, and by the city's street renovations. In 2018, the city narrowed North Monroe from two lanes to one lane in each direction between Northwest Boulevard and Garland.
"By narrowing it, they actually widened it, because pre-development, you couldn't even park without the danger of your mirror getting hit," Enslow says. "But I think having the center lane and having more comfortable spacing for parallel parking, all of these businesses here are flourishing... So the exciting thing about this location is that we're moving into a neighborhood that is already on the rise."
Indaba is opening its doors as its neighbor, Prohibition Gastropub, is closing. Social media posts from the restaurant said that parking issues were hurting business too much. But Indaba has a large parking lot behind it, as well as street parking.
And despite its being relatively close to other Indaba locations, Enslow says he sees new people from the Emerson-Garfield neighborhood walking into his shop every day.
"That's the power of a third space coffee shop, a community coffee shop, right?" he says. "Now you have all these neighbors that are meeting neighbors."
As Enslow sets off to empower other people to create similar third spaces in their communities, he's inspired by collaborations like the beer brewing certificate at Whitworth. Could Indaba partner with local colleges for coffee or entrepreneurship certificates? Could it help level up baristas and make Spokane as much of a coffee destination as Seattle?
Enslow would argue it is already.
"I will go and visit Seattle — all the shops close at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and all the coffee is still way over-roasted," he says. "I'll have people that come over here and be like, 'Man, Spokane is really spoiled when it comes to coffee.'"
Right now, the sky's the limit for Enslow and his crew. They're reaching up toward the sun, but keeping their roots firmly planted.
"Allowing local owners to create their own communities and expression — it's just so beautiful," Enslow says. "Empathy cannot exist without a sense of place." ♦
Indaba Flagship Roastery Grand Opening • Sat, Sept. 21 from 6 am-9 pm • Indaba Coffee • 2020 N. Monroe St. • indabacoffee.com • 509-514-2639
