northlime
Parking her car to see a friend’s band play, Heidi Hays saw a building at the corner of Sixth and Limestone she’d never noticed before. She’s since left her job as a hardware engineer at Lexmark, and her business partner, Joe Ross, left his handling mortgages for Fifth Third. With the help of a third partner, Teddy Ray, they’re opening a coffee and donut shop in the recently spruced-up former liquor store.
“I saw this was available and the façade of the building really drew me in. It was totally different from what I knew this area to be just a few years ago, so it was kind of one of those ‘oh’ moments,” said Hays, sitting at a table inside North Lime Coffee and Donuts, which is expected to open in the first week of September.
“This is the up-and-coming neighbor-hood; I foresee it as the Bardstown Road [area in Louisville] eventually as it starts to grow up,” said Ross, who subscribes to the slow-food movement of serving local and freshly prepared food.
“We have a big focus on doing everything through local channels. Our coffee is roasted by Nate’s Coffee, and he’s just a few miles from here. It helps it be extremely fresh,” Ross said. “We’re not trying to be a fast-food coffee place or a fast-food donut place. It’s along the lines of the slow-food movement, where everything is hand crafted, meticulously designed.”
They’ll even employ Nathan Polly of Nate’s Coffee part-time as a barista.
“One of the things we want to incorporate into everything we sell here is just the time that we put into it,” Hays said. “We’re not using mixes for our donuts. We’re trying to use local ingredients as much as it makes sense.
“Things are better when they are made from scratch and they are made with time.
“I think back to my family getting frozen rolls, but on Thanksgiving we’d make the bread from scratch, and it’s just that special kind of thing. I want the quality to come through, and I want the intentional time spent doing it to get it just right to really be apparent,” she said.
Hays and Ross decided to take the dive into their own business after discussing the prospect of opening a place that does baked goods and coffee, noting that coffee shops don’t often offer quality baked goods and bakeries often see coffee as an afterthought. Ray is serving as bookkeeper while remain-ing in his full-time job.
They began discussing opening a place like this in February and in May saw the space where they are now setting up shop.
“In my mind, I thought maybe a few years later we’ll get around to it. When this space came around, we said, ‘We’ve got to do it now,’” Hays said.
The building is split into two sides connected by an alcove that will serve as their counter. A kitchen full of coffee and baking equipment sits on one side, and the customer seating area, along with a door to their patio and deck for live music and readings, is on the other side of the building.
On most mornings, Hays will arrive to start cooking for a 6 a.m. open time and they’ll gauge a closing time based on their crowds. For now, they are planning on some late-night hours, as they are across the street from Al’s Bar and another bar is planned for the opposite corner of the intersection. For the night owls, Hays is planning on baking kolaches, a stuffed pastry often featuring fruit, but hers will feature meat and cheese — like a “fancy Hot Pocket,” she said.
After leaving careers in the financial and technology industries, Ross and Hays said they are following their passions in areas they have experience in.
“There’s great things that Starbucks does; they’re a great company,” Ross said of the mega-coffee enterprise he worked at for five years and is looking to glean operational best practices from. “We want to be very local, and they’re a large corporation, so [there are some aspects I have to] take from local places and playing at home on my espresso machine for several years to come up with some different variations of drinks.
“My family has always been into coffee, and I’ve always liked the idea of a coffee shop, much more than I did coffee at first. Then I started getting really into coffee seven, eight years ago,” he said.
Hays spent free time often baking cakes for friends’ birthdays and weddings, the kind of extreme cakes seen on reality TV shows that look too good and decorative to possibly sink a knife into.
“The more and more I got into that I got so busy, I was thinking about going out on my own to do something along those lines. I just really have a passion for baked goods,” she said. “Making food for people makes me really happy.”