For years, ordering at The Millhouse Café meant choosing from a menu that barely changed season to season. That ended this fall, when new owner Felix Amara rolled out a menu overhaul that keeps the café's old-fashioned drip coffee but adds a slate of pastries and lunch items the previous ownership had resisted for more than a decade.
Felix Amara, who purchased The Millhouse Café from the Delacoeur family after they decided to retire from the restaurant business, said he spent his first several months as owner deliberately changing almost nothing, worried that customers would abandon the café if it felt unfamiliar. “I bought a business with thirty years of trust built up,” Amara said. “You don’t get to just walk in and redecorate. I wanted people to still recognize the place before I touched anything.”
A menu overhaul, finally
The new fall menu adds eleven items, including a rotating pastry case supplied by a Cedar Hollow bakery, two grain-bowl lunch options, and an espresso lineup to sit alongside the café’s longtime drip coffee. Amara said the changes came after months of tracking which requests customers made most often at the counter, a list he said was dominated by requests for food options beyond the café’s traditional muffins and bagels. “People wanted to be able to eat an actual lunch here,” he said. “We were leaving money on the table by not having that.”
Longtime regular Doris Kessling, who said she has ordered the same black coffee and bagel at the café’s counter most weekday mornings for close to fifteen years, said she approached the new menu with skepticism. “Every time a place like this changes hands, you brace yourself,” Kessling said. “I’ve seen it happen on this street. New owner, new name, and suddenly it’s not the place you liked anymore.” She said she has since tried two of the new grain bowls and, despite herself, liked them.
I told him to his face I didn’t think we needed grain bowls at The Millhouse. Then I ordered one because my daughter wouldn’t stop asking about it, and now I order it twice a week. I’m annoyed about being wrong, honestly.
Doris Kessling, Millhouse Café regular
Staff mostly unchanged
Amara said he kept nearly the entire staff from the previous ownership, including a barista who has worked at the café for eleven years, a decision he said mattered as much to preserving the café’s identity as any menu item. “The people behind the counter are the café, more than the coffee is,” he said. “If I’d brought in a whole new staff along with a new menu, I don’t think regulars would have forgiven me.” He said he added two part-time positions to handle the expanded lunch service, both filled by Kincaid University students.
Theresa Nakamura, executive director of the Bellwater Chamber of Commerce, said ownership transitions at legacy Vale Avenue businesses like The Millhouse Café have become more common as founding owners reach retirement age, a pattern she said the chamber has tried to manage carefully given the café’s role as an informal meeting spot for city officials, reporters, and downtown workers. “This is one of the places where half the deals in this city’s history have effectively gotten worked out over coffee,” Nakamura said. “Losing that character would be a bigger loss to downtown than losing any one storefront.”
Amara said he is aware of the café’s reputation as an unofficial extension of nearby City Hall, joking that he has learned to recognize which corner booth belongs to which city council member’s staff, and that he has been watching the debate over the city’s plan to renovate City Hall Plaza with particular interest, since a longer construction closure could either bring him more foot traffic or cut off his morning rush entirely. “I’ve had to learn who likes their coffee before a meeting and who likes it after,” he said. “That part of the job came with the building, I think.”
The café is not the only Vale Avenue small business navigating a change in ownership or format this year. Amara said he has been in occasional contact with the new owners of Ledger & Leaf Books, the independent bookstore a few doors down, comparing notes on the bookstore’s own recent addition of a café counter, which now competes for some of the same midday coffee customers. “We’re not exactly rivals,” Amara said. “But I noticed when their espresso machine went in.”
- The Millhouse Café changed ownership earlier this year when the Delacoeur family sold the business to Felix Amara.
- The new fall menu adds eleven items, including grain bowls, an espresso lineup, and a rotating pastry case.
- Nearly the entire previous staff, including an eleven-year barista, stayed on under the new ownership.
Amara said early sales data from the new menu’s first two weeks show lunch revenue up roughly 20 percent over the same period last year, though he cautioned it was too early to know whether the gain would hold once the initial curiosity wore off. “The real test isn’t the first two weeks,” he said. “It’s whether people are still ordering the grain bowl six months from now instead of just trying it once because it’s new.”
Kessling said she plans to keep coming back regardless of how the broader menu experiment fares, so long as her black coffee and bagel stay on the menu. “He hasn’t touched the bagel,” she said. “As long as that stays the same, he can add whatever he wants around it.”