Milwaukee coffee lovers rejoice!
Stone Creek, which opened its Downer Avenue cafe walk-up window this week, announced Thursday the phased reopening of its Milwaukee-area cafes for pickup service.
"As Wisconsin continues to progress in its fight against COVID-19 we will begin to reopen our cafes in phases," reads an email from the company. "We do have plans to eventually reopen the cafes to customer access and seating. We will announce those plans in the weeks ahead following the progress of Gov. Evers’ ‘Badger Bounce Back’ benchmarks."
The cafes will be open 6 a.m. until 5 p.m. daily, with some exceptions. The cafes will have a limited selection of bakery items as bakery operations slowly resume. There will, of course, be drinks, bagged coffee and merchandise for sale.
Gift cards cannot currently be integrated with the online system in use at this time, so please hang on to them for when the cafes fully open.
Options for mobile ordering – which is required during this time – can be found at stonecreekcoffee.com/mobile-ordering or on the Stone Creek app.
Here is Stone Creek’s intended reopening schedule:
Monday, May 11
Downer Cafe & Kitchen
Glendale
Tosa Harwood
Delafield
Wednesday, May 13
Factory Cafe, 5th Street
Shorewood
Monday, May 18
Oconomowoc
Tosa Bluemound
Bay View
Wednesday, May 20
Whitefish Bay
Radio MKE/Pittsburgh Avenue
Grand Avenue
At the same time, Stone Creek announced that it has no plan to reopen its Chicago cafe on Belmont Avenue.
"We remain very proud of this cafe and our CHI-based team," read the statement.
"This was a strong cafe for us in regards to being our second highest customer count when ranking all of our cafes. However, we had (and will have) a lot of internal discussions and difficult decisions to make. In light of the current landscape, and the focus on digging out of the red while planning for survival into the future, we have decided not to continue on with this cafe. Our tip toe into Chicago has been an amazing learning experience for us, and we thank you."
Chicago employees have been offered the opportunity to work at Stone Creek’s Wisconsin locations. Chicago customers with gift cards can email customers@stonecreekcoffee.com or call (414) 270-1008 for a refund of the card balance.
"We don’t want to sugarcoat it: This path we’ve been traveling has been really hard. With a lot of planning and elbow grease, we are now ready to announce the timeline for the reopen of the rest of our cafes," the statement notes.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
