If you find yourself traveling through Upstate New York in the Catskill area and you’re looking for a bite to eat, there are plenty of options on hand. One of the best, Deer Mountain Inn, has already been covered in a Feel Good Friday post, but there’s another that you can find if you’re interested in looking for something a little more relaxed and quick called the Blue Bee Cafe.
Situated on one of the main thoroughfares of Delphi, New York, Blue Bee Cafe is a go-to place for residents, tourists, and SUNY students to gather and connect over fresh meals prepared with locally-sourced ingredients. However, it didn’t start as a cafe offering a place for people to congregate over a good cup of coffee or a meatloaf sandwich, but as a bookshop.
But before we get into the details about that pivot, let’s talk about the Feel Good elements of the Blue Bee Cafe.
What Feels Good About The Blue Bee Cafe
Entering the Blue Bee Cafe, the space feels designed to welcome you in. There’s plenty of pale wood paneling and decor alongside mint green walls to help give the space a warmth that feels like it belongs in a French bistro. The stained glass-style windows on one wall, vintage-style booths, and jazz music playing over the speakers amplify the aesthetic, making it an attractive place for anyone looking to linger for a little while with family and friends.
Of course, restaurants can’t rely solely on designing a space people want to maintain their bottom line, and Blue Bee Cafe is no different. You can order a variety of typical coffeehouse fare, with an extra layer of care put into its creation: coffee is served in extra large cups alongside pastries that were baked that day, and if you want something heartier, you can order sandwiches and other “simple” fare that feels familiar while being entirely locally sourced.
Pivoting From Books to Pastries
Stephanie Carter and her husband John Halberian, the owners of the Blue Bee Cafe, didn’t begin with the bistro they operate today; instead, they started a bookstore called the Steinway Book Company, which sported floor-to-ceiling shelves and some cozy places to leaf through the pages of the inventory while looking for the next read. However, when they started offering coffee and sandwiches, customer interest swelled significantly, prompting the owners to pivot from bookseller to bistro tending.
Now, the cafe is enjoying its place among the hickster movement—or hipsters who decide to become hicks as Robert Sietsema describes them in his article for Eater—by combining culinary elements that feel familiar in new ways so that it creates memorable epicurean experiences.
The Growth Strategies Found at The Blue Bee Cafe
Anyone who starts a business usually hopes that it will end up being successful, and it seems like most who opt to enter the book trade do it because they they love literacy and want to promote it. However, even the greatest love in the world for what you do has to be tempered by the realities of the business climate, and selling books can be challenging if you don’t have a way of tapping into complimentary systems like Barner Books and Inquiring Minds were able to. So it is simultaneously a brave decision and a challenging one that Carter and Halberian had to make when they chose to turn Steinway Book Company into Blue Bee Cafe.
What’s Gained in Pivoting
Organizations can’t remain static: supply and demand shape the landscape of what businesses can offer to customers and that requires flexibility in vision and strategy to remain competitive. In many cases, this requires a willingness to start over rather than trying to bail out a ship that may not be suited for the seas it’s sailing through.
Steinway Book Company could have continued in the book trade; there are examples of legacy book brands turning around their fortunes to become profitable, with the most notable being Barnes and Noble. However, effective leadership requires constantly receiving client feedback and using that to inform changes to the business so it doesn’t fall into irrelevance, so when the customer base swells suddenly in the face of a small innovation, it’s worth following that to its understandable conclusion.
The pivot has paid off too, with Blue Bee Cafe turning into a different kind of community hub than the Steinway Book Company originally began as.
Leaning into Changing Food Tastes
There are a variety of places that have cropped up that may fit this “hickster” profile, though they seem more like places that lean into nostalgia and simplicity than true hipster establishments. Some examples have already made it into the Feel Good Friday series with The Bakery and The Ridge Cafe, but it’s also clear that part of why these are successful is that they cater to a market that’s become increasingly important to consumer brands: the nostalgia for simpler times.
You would be hard pressed to find a meatloaf sandwich on many establishments trying to offer high-quality experiences unless they had a specific farmhouse bent to them. Yet, go to Blue Bee Cafe and you’ll find a lovely option to remind you of eating leftovers from the Sunday meatloaf for lunch the next day.
The Bottom Line
Road trips often follow set paths through well known areas, and that’s usually because they reliably produce high-quality experiences. Yet, when you find yourself wandering through back roads and small towns, it’s possible to find hidden gems like the Blue Bee Cafe along the way. Small businesses like it can highlight the value that even small organizations can derive from finding ways to pivot in response to changing customer needs.
However, Blue Bee Cafe is more than a place for business lessons, because it offers a space to share a meal, relax with friends or family, and chat for a while as the coffee in your cup slowly dwindles over the course of a couple of hours. That sentiment helps make Blue Bee Cafe a place for community and connection, regardless of whether you’re a local, a student, or just passing through.
If you do find yourself out that way, be sure to check out their brunch menu, because their over-sized coffee cups will need plenty of time to draw down.
Before You Go…
This is part of a series of articles highlighting businesses operating in the food and beverage space as part of an initiative to share feel good stories coming from local businesses. There's a few things you can do to support this initiative:
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