Written by Jordan Michelman.
With the warm months landing, and the promise of endless summer days (and nights!) stretching out before us, the mind can’t help but drift to thoughts of coffee. What better partner could there be to our favorite summer activities—surfing, farmers’ markets, big outdoor gatherings, and so forth—than a deliciously dialed-in professional espresso service? It’s fair to say I’m a pretty big fan.
Over the next few months, we’ll be profiling mobile coffee carts that take their espresso service seriously, offering a cafe-level beverage experience in unlikely places, to the delight and enjoyment of all. Proper gear is a huge part of that story, of course, but there’s also something like pluck, verve, esprit d’adventure to the whole thing that makes these stories so very worth telling. First off, a visit to Resident Coffee in Gainesville, Florida, where an outstanding farmers market coffee cart is getting ready to make way for brick & mortar dreams to come true. I spoke with Resident Coffee co-founder Gabriel Chavez to learn more.
Hey Gabriel! Thanks so much for speaking with me. As an introduction, can you please share more about what you do at Resident Coffee for folks who might be unfamiliar with your work?
Sure, of course! Resident Coffee launched in 2020, and our mission is really about telling the story of incredible coffees and the remarkable people who make them along the way. We are hyper-focused on storytelling and relationship building in our work.
We actually started as a cafe in 2018 called Wyatt’s Coffee. I began working there as a barista, became the manager, and eventually purchased the shop. My business partner, Noe Lopez, joined me in 2020, and we launched Resident as a roastery with hospitality at the very front of what we do.
On the roasting side, it’s all about the coffees we choose and how that supports our wholesale and retail program, and for me, our cart is a natural extension of this idea. We first launched our cart as more of a little folding table, doing cold brew and coffee in 2021. We did it out of a desire to connect the community beyond bags on our shelf. We started doing farmers’ markets and very quickly realized how essential they were to our mission. So we doubled down, and in late 2022, we launched a coffee cart, taking out a loan to purchase a Simple Cart Systems cart in Baltic birch, armed with a La Marzocco GS3 and a Mahlkonig K30 grinder.
When we brought it to the farmers market in our town, nobody had ever really done express like this at the market before, and people were totally blown away by the idea that you could get a beautiful latte or capp or shot from a tiny little setup. And we pretty quickly became the most popular vendor at the market, with a line that would wrap down the booth. We do this farmers market service every weekend, we still run Wyatt’s as a cafe, and later this year we’re opening a Resident Coffee flagship, which has been three years in the making.
That’s all very cool. Tell me — what are some of the unique challenges of running a coffee cart like yours? And what are some of the big opportunities it presents?
You know, the best part I think is the closeness. At most cafes, you’re going to have like 3 or 4 feet of counter space between you and your guest, but when you’re working on a cart, it’s so much more intimate. My business partner and I are running the cart every weekend, and I take the orders and talk to people, and he preps the espresso and makes the drinks. I’ll be standing on the side of the cart, perpendicular to the cart, and it allows for a direct connection with the guests. You can shake hands and talk together, and it’s so relatable and special. People get to join you for the experience of making coffee in a different way, and I think there’s a wow factor too. There’s an expectation people might have about how good the coffee could possibly be, but then you whip up something that’s the same as what you’d get at a really high-end cafe, and you just see people’s jaws drop. People bring their kids for the latte art show, and it’s special.
The biggest downside for us is probably about power, and how much power you can have reliable access to. We run everything off a 110 20 amp circuit that the business we’re in front of has graciously given us access to—our farmers market doesn’t allow generators, so it’s all run off that one circuit. With a GS3, K30, and a kettle for hot water on one circuit, you have to be careful not to blow the breakers.
Why go with a GS3? What is it about this particular espresso machine that feels suited to the mobile care work you’re doing at Resident?
We never wanted to use a smaller machine. Let me be clear: espresso machines like the Linea Mini or Linea Micro are amazing, but I wanted to have a piece of gear that would allow me to hold up to a really busy market day. On a normal day at our farmers market, we open at 8:30 AM, and we serve until noon. There are days when we serve 200 cups at that time. It gets pretty wild, and we definitely push that GS3 to its limits. A smaller espresso machine would never work in that environment; we wanted a machine that would allow us to be future-proof, and that’s the GS3.
We aren’t for hire for other sorts of events—we don’t do weddings or parties, it’s just not in our business model—but we recently brought the cart to Orlando Coffee Fest, which was pretty cool. At our new cafe a big chunk of our service will be around single dose espresso; we’re freezing single doses of 4-5 coffees at a time, and we want to present them and runt hem through an EK43 grinder with special burrs to achieve consistent results. We did a preview of this at the Coffee Fest with no cappuccinos, only espresso, serving six different coffees. We ran the cart with a GS3 and an 3K next to it and I have to say, it was the most equipment-related series of conversations I’ve ever had with the cart. People were just blown away and very curious about it all. This type of service is a lot of work, a lot of prep, but the results and excitement you can get from it is so very much worth it.
Visit Resident Coffee Roasters at their website and on Instagram.
