Portage’s new Next Chapter Cafe has a twist. It’s BYOF – bring your own food.
The café run by Taylor Cook serves a variety of nonalcoholic drinks to go along with whatever you might bring to munch on.
Cook, a former bartender, calls herself a soberista, a term coined by her fiancé, Portage Recovery Association Executive Director Jake Monhaut.
“I kind of just gave her the keys,” Monhaut said, and was surprised by what she did with the place.
Monhaut originally was thinking of a concession stand in the Portage Recovery Association’s lounge. A pool table, a TV showing sports on the wall, a few chairs, a small place to sell nonalcoholic drinks to the public, much like at the nonprofit’s previous location on McCasland Avenue.
Instead, Cook transformed it into a large area with a long counter, bar stools, tables and chairs, and several televisions brought in from elsewhere in the building. She was finicky about the decorating scheme, even wanting a dark ceiling to define the space.
“With a big building comes big dreams and big ideas,” Monhaut said. Northwest Health donated the building to the nonprofit a year ago.
The long counter Cook works behind resembles a bar, but that’s a term Cook won’t use for it. She’s been sober for two years. “We can call it a counter. Bar is a funky term in our community,” she said.
The Next Chapter Café at 6040 Lute Road has an entrance separate from the one used for groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. “We tell people when you come on this side of the building, you’re just hanging it out,” Monhaut said.
“This brings kids, women, children, everybody,” Cook said.
Some of the drinks have names people in Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous would pick up on – Dirty Dr. Bob, Easy Does It Moran Inventory, Just for Today, The Overshare and more – but the drinks are as fun as the names.
Cook mixed an Overshare to show how it works. It involves Red Bull, Sprite and, to give it a splash of whimsy, Pop Rocks, the Rice Krispies of candy with their snap, crackle and pop.
The dirty sodas, energy fusions and other drinks are fun to make, and they’re Cook’s original creations. She wants customers to “drink a fun drink that wasn’t just a pop poured in a cup,” she said.
Cook has had plenty of experience making drinks. At 18, she ran a coffee shop in Miller, she said. She just had to sell the nonprofit’s board on her selling drinks there.
“I was so scared to tell the board that I wanted to sell drinks from a counter-style bar,” she said. Before asking them, Cook provided them with some of the drinks she created.
It was pitched as a board-building exercise. She made the Dirty Dr. Bob, Easy Does It, Pink Cloud (one of the café’s best-sellers), PRA Signature Drink, Rooted Recovery and Just for Today. “They were saying things like, ‘I’m going to have a sugar rush,’” Cook said.
Then the engaged couple popped the question to the board. “Oh my gosh, we were prepared,” Cook said, with answers to their questions. The board quickly said, we trust you. Do it.
It took about three weeks to get the construction in place. The generosity of people still astounds Monhaut and Cook. After a social media post on the need for a new sink, a woman gave Monhaut $1,000. He told her the sink would cost only $300, but she insisted on the full amount, with the extra to be used for whatever the nonprofit needed.
Within the first hour Next Chapter Café was open, two younger girls came in, Cook said. One of the girls said she had an alcohol problem but didn’t want to go to a meeting, so this was her baby step.
“Within three weeks, we’ve already made half the investment back,” Cook said.
She encourages parents to bring their kids, letting them play games and color pages.
Cook and Monhaut are also eager to host groups for special events.
They’re partnering with the Hobart Humane Society for a cat café periodically. The first one was wildly successful. “I made 72 handcrafted drinks in three hours. My arms were going to fall off,” Cook said.
The space can be rented out for parties and other private events, too. “If someone wants to rent it and have a themed drink menu, we can make that happen,” Cook said.
On Dec. 13, the café will have a Taylor Swift dance party. Cook also wants to bring in a professional karaoke person, and slam poetry is an option, too. A coffee and canvas event, pictures with Santa and other plans spring forth from the font of creativity.
Hours are 3-7 p.m. Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays.
“We would like to expand those in the future, once we find our little niche where we fit,” Cook said. “Right now, I am the only person trained on these drinks.”
Originally, the café was opening at 4 p.m. on Thursdays, but teachers were coming in after school. It’s a good place for teachers to hang out after school, but parents could bring their kids, too, and provide them with a place to study after school, Cook said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
