Ortiz and Sanchez
Some time after midnight, during the initial hours of December 9, Chris Ortiz and Salvador Sanchez received an urgent phone call from the police. With windows shattered and cash register emptied, their coffee shop — A Cup of Common Wealth — had been burglarized.
After arriving on location and surveying the scene, they posted the news to social media, informing their customers of what had transpired. A few minutes later, a local student who happened to be up studying for finals drove directly to the shop with leftover window insulation from a home project.
“And a big bag of gummy bears,” Ortiz added.
Not long after boarding up the windows, they sat in their shop and watched the Christmas movie “Elf” until the sun came up and their morning customers started rolling through.
“The whole community came in like a giant army afterward,” Ortiz said.
The cost of the window was covered soon after, as the tip jar consistently began to overflow. One customer even dropped off a large envelope of cash. Due to other stores in town also being robbed, Sanchez and Ortiz gave out free coffee to patrons who promised to shop at those stores.
Sanchez, who has wanted to open up a coffee shop ever since he was a kid, said that all of this fits right in with their mission: Embrace community. Serve others. Create culture.
“We kind of attack everything that way, and make sure that all of our decisions are based on that,” he said.
Take their Pay-it-Forward board, for example — a concept that allows customers to purchase a drink for a person who isn’t there. After paying the $5 flat rate for anything above and below on the menu, the customer writes the order and the person it’s for on a coffee cup sleeve, then pins it to the wall. The recipient can be a specific person, or it can be for a complete stranger.
Ortiz and Sanchez are both Kentucky transplants, originally from Oklahoma and Michigan respectively, but they came to an agreement that Lexington was the place they wanted to live and work.
“We really love the Midwest, and we call this the elbow — where you get that Midwestern [feeling], but you get the Southern hospitality with it,” Ortiz said. “There isn’t a lot of coffee here in Lexington for a city its size and reputation, so we thought it’d be a perfect spot. We love the community around it.”
Despite their shop being rather small, they have no worries that they’ll outgrow their space. On the contrary, the small quarters endear them to it even more.
“I think we keep finding that we can fit more and more in it,” said Ortiz. “That’s kind of where we’re at now — trying to fill every nook and cranny we can.”
Sanchez thinks the size helps define the mood of the shop and is a contributing factor to its uniqueness.
“It’s got a really cool urban feel that a lot of the coffeehouses in Lexington don’t necessarily have right now,” he said.
To many baristas, the act of making and designing a cup of coffee is a balance between science and art, from the intricate nature of brewing and equipment being treated like a chemistry lab, to a mixture of espresso and steamed milk being seen as an untouched canvas.
In fact, Sanchez states that there is a college degree that will soon be offered in “coffee science,” where students can go through different stages before ultimately receiving their barista certification. NPR reports the University of California-Davis has launched a coffee research center and hopes to offer the major in the next few years.
“Some people really love making drinks. Some people like learning about the history; some people want to know how it gets passed down from generation to generation,” Sanchez said. “Where did coffee come from? All together, it’s just its own subject matter to study.”
Sanchez, who also finds an artistic outlet through poetry, finds inspiration in the people and places of Lexington and in the simple joy of having experiences with friends or strangers who offer a sense of distinctness and color to his already lively coffee shop.
“There was a time where I was traveling a lot and people started becoming more and more similar and not as unique as they used to be,” he said. “Then coming to Lexington again and seeing customers come in, the uniqueness came back, which was really cool.”
When it comes to Ortiz, his ultimate ambitions for A Cup of Common Wealth hearken back to their mission of dedication to community, culture and the citizens of Lexington.
“We just want to be coffee ambassadors for the city,” Ortiz said. “Laying a good foundation here in Lexington is kind of what we’re after immediately.”