Five-and-a-half years later, Brenda Godfrey is making good on her vision.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said the co-owner of Frank & Roze.
The former Starbucks executive opened the coffee shop’s first location at Ninth Avenue and Colorado Boulevard in 2019 and never intended for it to be a one-off. Earlier this year, she finally signed a 10-year lease for a second location in Uptown, aiming to open by the holidays.
Frank & Roze will fill 4,100 square feet at the corner of Pennsylvania Street and 19th Avenue that was formerly home to D-Bar, a dessert cafe that closed nearly a year ago. The space is on the ground floor of the One City Block apartment building.
“The community in that neighborhood is fantastic. (People) live and work there all within two to three blocks,” she said. “It’s 100% about providing a place where they feel welcome, and the community there is the reason we chose it.”
The restaurant will use its bigger kitchen to expand the shop’s menu of breakfast sandwiches, baked goods, sandwiches and salads.
Local chef Tom Coohill, the owner of downtown French spot Coohills, is the man behind the menu. He has worked with Godfrey since Frank & Roze’s opening, serving frittatas and specialty toast alongside the shop’s brews at the original 2,500-square-foot shop.
Frank & Roze currently serves wine and beer at that location, but Godfrey wants a full liquor license to go with Uptown’s 18-seat bar.
“We’ll have a proper brunch full of Eggs Benedicts and Bloody Marys and all the mimosas you can imagine,” she said.
The space will likely be open a little later than the 5:30 p.m. close the first location has. Godfrey wants to get a happy hour crowd in there through the early evening while still having time to hold private events like the work parties and anniversaries that she has at the other spot.
She said the design of the new location will lean toward higher-end “vibey” fabrics rather than the mid-century modern aesthetic the original place is known for. Plants will still be prominently featured, she said.
“You need to be able to sit at the bar and be comfortable working on a laptop in the morning and also having a Manhattan and chatting with friends in the afternoon,” she said of the space.
At Starbucks, Godfrey was in a divisional management role on the development and real estate teams. With Frank & Roze, she aimed to build a café that was scalable. But opening four months before the pandemic hit affected her ability to grow, she said. Dealing with a three-month shutdown, inflationary pressures and a rising Denver minimum wage, Godfrey wanted to make sure the first spot was air tight before opening a second.
Some of those changes included trimming the menu and finding more efficient software systems and staffing setups. She said the business saw double-digit revenue growth in each of its first five years.
“We were very, very selective in moving forward. We looked at a lot of real estate, talked to a lot of developers,” she said. “We looked at a number of opportunities within the Uptown area. We looked in the Highlands, LoHi, Golden Triangle too, the usual suspects.”
Godfrey said this isn’t the last expansion for Frank & Roze. But for now, she said 98% of her attention is on keeping the current location well oiled and setting up the Uptown spot for success.
“The second location is almost more important than the first, in the sense that can you actually demonstrate that you can replicate your concept and the business model has legs?” she said. “You want to make sure your model is sound, you have real estate fundamentals and you understand who your customers are and how they want to enjoy your hospitality.”
This story was originally published by BusinessDen.
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