San Antonio Coffee Shop Local Brews Up Austin Cafe

Local, one of San Antonio’s best coffee shops, is making its way to Austin with a new location right in downtown Austin. The Seaholm cafe will carry fresh pastries and macarons from San Antonio’s popular bakeshop Bakery Lorraine, which will include exclusive treats like doughnuts and pies.

Owner Robby Grubbs always wanted to open an Austin coffee shop. That was his original plan when he lived here in 2008, but the recession made it difficult. Instead, he and his family moved to San Antonio and opened Local there, followed by five other locations. “Austin is just full circle for us,” he said.

“In my head, I call it Local 2.0,” he said, because it’s a culmination of what he did in San Antonio and bringing it all back to Austin. He had been looking for a location for several years when the Seaholm property became available.

The space on West Avenue (parallel to Trader Joe’s, within the same building as True Food Kitchen) will feature a Modbar espresso system, which will be built in one giant unit. There will be indoor and outdoor seating. Clayton and Little Architects is designing the cafe.

Grubbs sees Local as adding to Austin’s already solid coffee scene. “You’re not going to see the same coffee shared by other people in Texas,” he said. He cares about every aspect of the cafe from the coffee to the look to the pastries. He just came back from a coffee sourcing trip in Colombia.

“We want to be able to serve the pickiest of coffee people,” he said, “and satisfy them, but, man, we want everybody to enjoy themselves.”

The goal is to open Local Austin by early November. He’s already looking to expand in the city with a potential second location in the works.

• Local Coffee [Official]