If Café Panache is your favorite spot for coffee, breakfast or lunch, you only have a few more days to enjoy it.
Café owner Denise Bollard will shutter the European-style café after the close of business Saturday, May 11. Café Panache is open 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. through Saturday.
“I expect that day will be bittersweet,” she said, “I love the café. It was a great business, and I love the customers, but it’s also another full-time job for me. It’s just time for me to retire from the restaurant business.”
Bollard, who is also a real estate broker with REMAX Cornerstone, opened the café at 931 Russell Drive, North Cornwall Township, in late October 2015. It‘s next door to her real estate business, and she owns the building that houses both businesses.
“I’ve been in real estate a while and that’s what I love to do,” she said.
She explained that running the restaurant became too much. “A restaurant is a business you can’t walk away from. We’ve had a wonderful staff, but when you get a call early in the morning that a worker is sick and can’t come in, you have to step up and find a solution. Because we’ve had a lean staff, many times that solution would be me — I’ve cooked, made pizzas and have been a server, and I’m not the best server,” Bollard said.
Cafe Panache focuses on “locally-sourced food with a French flair,” and everything is made in-house. The breakfast menu includes baked oatmeal with seasonal fruit, breakfast croissant, breakfast pizza, muffins, yogurt with fruit and granola, sweet potato pancakes and eggs Benedict. The lunch menu includes brick oven pizzas, sandwiches, tomato pie, quiche du jour, tomato basil soup and a soup du jour, as well as a variety of salads. There’s a variety of coffee beverages, teas and milk as well as Boylan sodas.
Café Panache closed briefly last year – mid-May to mid-July – due to staffing issues. At the time it closed, Bollard intended to lease the space to another restaurant, but hit a snag with the zoning ordinance. With customers urging her to re-open and the staffing issues resolved, Café Panache re-opened. “Everything just fell into place,” she said about that time.
North Cornwall Township manager Justin Thompson said the café is considered an accessory use to the real estate office, which is in the office & institutional district. He said the types of eateries that could use the café space include a bakery or a coffee shop, but not a stand-alone restaurant.
Bollard said with those restrictions in mind, she plans to lease the space to a “like-kind light fare” place. “It’s a cute little spot, and it’s turnkey. I’m leaving the equipment and the furnishings,” she explained, “There are good things to come, they’ll just be different (than Café Panache).”
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