Fonté Café & Wine Bar

Childhood memories of the smell of fresh coffee beans in gourmet food stores and the taste of hot coffee from the stove top at home with lots of milk and sugar were so strong that Paul Odom had no choice but to make coffee his career.

In the 80s when coffee was coming on strong in Seattle, Paul was 18 and deciding what to do with his life. "I started doing research in Europe and across the U.S.," Paul explains. "When you’re young, people don’t always take you seriously and they’ll tell you anything. I visited a lot of roasters to find out how they roasted coffee. My real goal was to roast my own coffee, but I needed an outlet to sell it and thought the Seattle market was saturated. I was so desperate to do it, I moved to Alaska and opened three coffee bars, buying coffee from a roaster that is now out of business."

Photo above: Fonté Owner Paul Odom at Cafe with Berkel meat slicer

Photo below: Roaster Steve Smith, courtesy of Fonté

He searched for roasting machines until he found what he wanted. At a tasting in 1992, he met Steve Smith (pictured at left courtesy of Fonte) who had been a roaster for Starbucks for 12 years, training under the three original owners. He left for a small coffee company, now defunct, and worked there for a year developing his own style. Steve liked Paul’s idea of artisan coffee roasting and was happy to sign on for six months to show Paul how to roast. "Almost 20 years later, we’re still working together," says Paul happily. "Roasting was a better business model than cafes. I had two coffee bars in Chicago, one in LA with a second being built and three in Anchorage. I didn’t want to go public and work for someone. Who would hire me anyway? I sold all the coffee bars, making more money on the sale than I ever did when I was running them. In some ways, I wish I still had them. The one in Chicago was in The Loop and one was in Santa Monica. Michelle Pfeiffer would stop in every day. I was just 23 and had movie stars coming into the café. But traveling to the cafes was taking me away from the coffee, which I didn’t like."

Paul focused on roasting and has built a company with a reputation for delicious high-end coffee. "I wanted to create the finest coffee in the world," he says. They source the top 1 percent of beans from around the world and roast to order, shipping to clients within hours of roasting. Their clientele is worldwide and includes luxury hotels like W, Four Seasons, Wynn Resort in Las Vegas; restaurants like Crush in Seattle; and Uptown Espresso. They use technology to make things as easy as possible for their clients. "A restaurant owner can get online at 2 a.m. and enter their order, without having to talk to anyone. Or they can just call us. Whatever works for them." Fonté roasts from 3000-9000 pounds per day, using Probat coffee roasting machines. "We buy the shell of the machine and build the inside. To be efficient, a lot of roasters have the flame under the machine encased in a box, so heat isn’t lost on the sides. We don’t do that. We have a number of flames, depending on the size of the machine, in a straight line beneath the roaster. It is inefficient, but you can control your roasting."

Despite roasting great coffee, they couldn’t get the press to write about them. "We’d hear ‘readers don’t care about the roasting.’ What we do to coffee makes us special, but consumers don’t know it’s available," says Paul. "I felt that we needed to open a café to showcase the coffee to both consumers and potential coffee clients. When you’re trying to sell to a restaurateur, they need to know you understand coffee and their needs. I know that a café has to be economically viable all hours of the day. This café needs to be a showcase for not only the coffee but also food. Chefs have given me bits of recipes and our menu is an amalgamation of what they’ve shared." The café, opened in August 2009, offers breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Photo: Fonté latte with oatmeal and fruit, courtesy of Fonté

With food comes alcohol, so Fonté offers beer, wine and spirits in addition to their espresso menu. They also have a happy hour which doesn’t necessarily make Paul happy. "You don’t see happy hours in other cities like you do here. And while I know everyone is looking for value, we’ve taken it so far here that we’re damaging ourselves. Do you really want to promote something that doesn’t represent you at your best?"

Fonté Café’s look is based on the architecture Paul appreciates in Italy. "This isn’t original thought; it’s been around for hundreds of years. My architect and I would go back and forth on things and the outcome is a combination of our ideas. He came up with the wood hanging from the ceiling and the metal across from the front door." A friend suggested to Paul that no one was doing an open garde manger station, so they created the cold kitchen next to the espresso area, leaving more room in the kitchen for food prep and cooking. "I’ve always wanted a Berkel meat slicer and we have one in that station. It’s hand cranked so the blade doesn’t get hot and cook the fat on the meat. That can change the flavor of the meat. It’s turn-of-the-century technology, but I think consumers want the real deal and a lot of times that means going back to fundamentals." That applies to how he runs the business as well. "The coffee roasting side is creative, artisanal and inefficient. The rest is more IBM-y," laughs Paul.

There are no current plans for more cafes. "This café is a pleasure; we just show off here. But it takes a lot of personal attention from me and I can’t imagine doing it twice. Plus my wife and I just had our second child in December, so I have work to do at home, too. If we ever did add something else, it would most likely be in a different market and be coffee only." Seattle can rest assured, at least for now, that we have the best coffee and wine café, Fonté-style.

Connie Adams/January 2011

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