Today, the terms library and café are as synonymous as wireless and Internet or smart and phone. When Starbucks partnered with Barnes & Noble in 1993, book repositories, like libraries, turned from hushed, food-prohibited reading sanctuaries to today’s food-friendly collaboratives.
The main branch of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County went more than a year without housing a café inside its Vine Street location downtown.
The main branch has become a revolving door of locally owned cafés since its 1997 renovation, which replaced the then nonfiction section with a restaurant on the mezzanine.
In late February, Vertigo Café — a subset of Vertigo Catering, which opened in 2011 in Hyde Park — joined the fray. Owner and chef Stephen Spyrou is the current president of the American Culinary Federation of Greater Cincinnati — the largest professional organization of chefs and cooks in the Tristate.
He uses that experience and his three-years as a Kroger sous chef to prepare the café’s menu, which includes 14 sandwiches, four green salads and up to five rotating sides, in-house, daily.
“We offer a grab-and-go concept,” Spyrou says. “We want customers to relax and enjoy lunch, not wait in line.”
That’s why about half of the 30 homemade food items are pre-packaged, like the edamame salad, blue cheese coleslaw and Black Forest ham sandwich, with Gouda, lettuce, tomato and bourbon mustard on a pretzel bun. Prices range from about $1.50 for side dishes and desserts to $6 for sandwiches and salads.
Perhaps this affordability and easy access will make the main library’s fifth restaurant in 18 years a success. In 2013, staff and patrons requested food options in the then-empty 1,200-square-foot facility next to the Friends of the Library gift shop. The search began for a locally owned restaurant, which would operate as its own entity.
Requests fueled the opening of the library’s first short-lived café in 1997, too.
Coffee and Tea Express sold drinks and snacks for two years. Then came The BonBonerie in 1999, Le’s Café around 2004 and S & J Café in 2012.
Sharon Butler, co-owner of The BonBonerie, found that downtown employees often didn’t have time to walk to the O’Bryonville bakery’s second location at the library for signature coffee and pastries, along with a few sandwiches.
“No one drives up to the library from Fourth Street for lunch,” she says.
The facility’s small kitchen prevented them from preparing items onsite and The BonBonerie library branch closed in two years. The same kitchen issue prevented the Vietnamese Le’s Café from serving pho until their 2012 relocation just a block north to Court Street, under the new name Le’s Pho and Sandwiches.
Le’s was replaced by S & J Café — an expansion of Skirtz & Johnston Fine Pastries and Chocolates of Findlay Market. It closed about a year later, around the same time as its flagship store.
The newest tenants hope downtown’s housing and employment boom will increase business.
An ongoing $30 million Broadway Square development includes 100 apartments and 35,000 square feet of retail and office space near the Horseshoe Casino.
Next year’s Global Operations Center for General Electric at The Banks will house up to 2,000 employees, as well as first floor retail. And the influx of wealthy new residents in Over-the-Rhine is already increasing street traffic just north on Vine.
“We’ve been looking for avenues in the downtown market,” Spyrou says. “We try to keep our food classic, with a slightly contemporary edge.”
Vailey Oehlke, president elect of the Public Library Association, the largest and oldest library alliance in the world, says the trend of cafés in libraries is not new.
“Libraries all over the country have them,” Oehlke says. “It enriches the experience, it creates a communal space.”
None of the 40 Cincinnati and Hamilton County Library branches have food options; most don’t have the space and none have as much foot traffic.
For Spyrou, it’s a natural connection.
“It adds a great value for patrons to be able to get coffee or a sandwich while at the library,” Spyrou says. “It just makes sense.”
Vertigo Cafe is open 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday inside the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County Main Branch, 800 Vine St., Downtown. More info: 513-556-2856 or vertigocafecincinnati.com.
