For twenty years, if you wanted to find a city council member off the record, the Millhouse Café on Vale Avenue was as good a bet as any. Now the café is taking its coffee, and its reputation as a de facto meeting hall, three-quarters of a mile east to Foundry Row.
Owner Deborah Castille, who bought the café from its founding family eight years ago and has kept its wood-paneled interior and $6.50 house scramble largely untouched, said the new location will open in a ground-floor retail space inside a converted textile building on Loom Street, a block from Loom Hall and roughly a ten-minute walk from Kestrel Biologics’ headquarters. She said the decision followed nearly two years of watching Foundry Row’s daytime foot traffic swell as biotech firms and Forge Bellwater’s startup tenants added employees.
Chasing the lunch rush, not just the morning one
“Our Vale Avenue location does its business in a two-hour window before nine in the morning,” Castille said. “Everything we’ve heard from customers who work in Foundry Row is that they need something open through the afternoon, because half of them are pulling twelve-hour lab shifts and coffee isn’t a morning thing for them, it’s an all-day thing.” The new café will keep longer hours than the original Vale Avenue shop, staying open until 8 p.m. on weekdays to capture evening lab shifts and Loom Hall concertgoers.
Theresa Nakamura, executive director of the Bellwater Chamber of Commerce, said the Millhouse’s expansion is one of the clearest signs yet that downtown’s legacy small businesses see durable, rather than temporary, opportunity in Foundry Row’s growth. “For years the story on Foundry Row was new money moving in and old Bellwater businesses staying put downtown,” Nakamura said. “Deborah opening a second location up there is downtown following the growth instead of just watching it happen.”
For years the story on Foundry Row was new money moving in and old Bellwater businesses staying put downtown. This is downtown following the growth instead of just watching it happen.
Theresa Nakamura, Bellwater Chamber of Commerce
A test of whether the original survives the copy
Not every regular is enthusiastic. Harold Denning, a retired city planning employee who has claimed the same corner table at the Vale Avenue location most weekday mornings for six years, said he worries the café’s identity is tied to its physical space, not just its menu. “Part of what makes that place what it is happens to be the room itself and who’s sitting in it,” Denning said. “You can copy the coffee. You can’t really copy forty years of people running into each other by accident.”
Castille said she has heard similar worries directly from longtime customers and has tried to address them by keeping the Vale Avenue location’s staff, hours and menu unchanged, treating the Foundry Row shop as an entirely separate operation with its own hires rather than a satellite drawing resources from the original. She has hired a general manager, previously a shift lead at a regional coffee chain, to run day-to-day operations at the new location so she can split her time between both.
The expansion comes as commercial rents in Foundry Row have climbed alongside biotech-sector demand for lab and office space, a trend that has made some retail landlords reluctant to lease ground-floor space to businesses that can’t match what a biotech tenant might pay for the same square footage. Castille said she secured a five-year lease at a rate she described as “fair, not cheap,” negotiated in part through a relationship with the building’s owner dating back to when he was a regular customer downtown.
Castille said she does not expect the second location to immediately match the Vale Avenue café’s revenue, given the lack of a built-in morning commuter crowd, but projects it will break even within its first eighteen months based on informal interest surveys she conducted among Foundry Row employers. She said several biotech firms, which she declined to name, have already inquired about standing catering orders for lab meetings and all-staff gatherings.
- Second location opens this fall on Loom Street in Foundry Row
- Will stay open until 8 p.m. on weekdays, longer than the original shop
- Vale Avenue location’s staff, hours and menu remain unchanged
- Break-even projected within eighteen months
Castille said she has no immediate plans beyond the second location but did not rule out further expansion if the Foundry Row shop performs well. “I told myself for years I’d never do this because I didn’t want to be the person who ruins a good thing by getting greedy,” she said. “But watching people drive fifteen minutes out of their way for a cup of coffee they could get closer to home finally talked me into it.”
The move also reflects a broader shift among Vale Avenue’s legacy small businesses, several of which have begun quietly exploring satellite locations as Foundry Row’s daytime population has grown. Nakamura said her office has fielded at least two similar inquiries from downtown retailers considering a second storefront near the biotech cluster, though she declined to name them before any lease is signed. Denning, the retired planning employee, said he ultimately hopes the expansion succeeds, even though he has no intention of giving up his own corner table downtown.