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A cafe serving up a lot more than morning coffee is opening next week in Sunnyvale.
Coffeebar, inspired by the cafe culture in Italy, offers food and drink options throughout the day – think breakfast sandwiches with fluffy soft scrambled eggs, salads featuring local produce and even Italian wines and local beers. Founded in Truckee in 2010 by former competitive skier Greg Buchheister, Coffeebar now also has locations in Menlo Park, Redwood City, Reno and Olympic Valley. Its latest outpost will soft open Nov. 11 in Sunnyvale’s Hartwood Apartments.
“I love making people feel great so they can go into the world and achieve their dreams. That’s what wakes me up in the morning,” Buchheister said. “With Coffeebar, our goal is to provide the fuel that propels you throughout the day.”
While beer and wine won’t be immediately available at the Sunnyvale cafe, as approval for the license is still pending, Coffeebar’s newest location will “have a fun, rotating, eclectic Italian wine list,” that will differentiate its menus from the other locations, Buchheister said. As for the rest of the menu, expect it to be similar to Coffeebar’s other locations – find caramel lattes made with sauce from Reno’s Dorinda’s Chocolates, Mexican mochas with cinnamon and cayenne, lavender tea lattes with vanilla agave and classic espresso beverages, like cappuccinos.
“I’m a cappuccino guy,” Buchheister said. “I’ve been doing this now for 25 years, and there’s just nothing like a cappuccino that has the perfect amount of foam, and sprinkle a little bit of raw sugar on top.”
Coffeebar believes that “fettuccine makes the perfect stir stick,” offering dried noodles instead of wooden sticks in an effort to reduce waste.
“I just thought, why do we have wooden stir sticks that are in a box, that are wrapped in plastic, that are in another box that you order?” Buchheister said. “The fettuccine … You just get thousands and thousands of them in a big bag. And I guess if you’re gluten-free, you can just grab a spoon and stir your coffee.”
Coffeebar roasts its own beans from its facility in Reno and sources its beans as directly as possible from its growers, Buchheister said. For example, each year it sources about 100 bags of coffee from La Suiza, a jungle co-op in the mountains of Guatemala.
“Our goal is to connect the dots between the farmer and the guests and have as few people touching that income stream as possible, so that the majority of that money goes back to the farmers and has a true impact at origin,” Buchheister said.
Coffeebar offers a seasonal single-origin coffee as well as three custom bean blends ($18-$22 per 12 oz): the Giuseppe Italian roast with notes of dark chocolate, nutmeg and molasses; the Prima Donna decaf blend with notes of salted caramel, walnut and cinnamon; and the Zephyr espresso blend with notes of cherry, milk chocolate and vanilla. The Zephyr espresso blend is named after Buchheister’s son, who died in 2019 at 3 years old from the flu mixed with a bacterial infection. The tragic loss forever changed Buchheister’s outlook on life and his business.
“What was more of a classic, ‘I want to scale this and do this thing,’ has now become ‘Life is short, and you don’t know when your ticket is going to get punched, so you should enjoy the bus ride,’” Buchheister said. “It’s gone from, ‘I want to build this company to achieve these goals,’ to ‘I really just want to take care of people, and I want to enjoy the bus ride with my team,’ because we’re not guaranteed tomorrow, and we definitely can’t do anything about yesterday.”
The inspiration for Coffeebar began when Buchheister traveled to Italy and experienced Italian cafe culture. In its earlier years, Coffeebar leaned into the Italian aspect more heavily, offering gelato, pre-stacked paninis and crepes. And while Coffeebar still embodies the idea of an all-day community cafe, the menu is a bit less Italian, featuring West Coast favorites like avocado toast and energy bites.
Buchheister got his start in the coffee business in 1998, when he began importing espresso from a small family company outside of Torino. About a decade later, he operated a medium-size wholesale company and had opened 15 cafes in Colorado. But the idea for Coffeebar didn’t come until a regular customer invited him to a three-week yoga retreat in India’s Himalayas. There, a swami told him he’d be a great leader and encouraged him to start his own brand away from where he lived.
In 2010, he sold his company and headed west to Los Angeles. After months of trying to secure a location for Coffeebar, he was almost out of money, so he went to Truckee, where his friend mentioned there was a vacant coffee shop. Buchheister had only $100 left, but the landlord never asked to see his bank statement, and the space was his. He raised $100,000 in 60 days, and put $40,000 on his credit card. Coffeebar Truckee opened Oct. 11, 2010, and by the end of its third year, Coffeebar was in the top 1% of all specialty coffee shops in the nation.
In 2014, Buchheister opened Coffeebar’s second location in Reno and got married. A year later, he opened Coffeebar Bakery in Truckee, keeping the existing gluten-free bakery while adding a conventional bakery, production facility and espresso bar. Then in 2016, Coffeebar Olympic Valley opened.
Shortly before opening Coffeebar Bakery, a longtime Coffeebar customer – a Truckee local, athlete and professional investor with an office in Menlo Park – asked if Buchheister was interested in expanding to the Bay Area.
“Naïve mountain boy that I was, I had no idea where Menlo Park was — I actually thought it was an office park,” Buchheister wrote on the Coffeebar website.
In 2018, Coffeebar opened its first Peninsula outpost. A year later, it opened its second in Redwood City and a third on Facebook campus, which closed in 2022.
Now, Buchheister looks forward to opening his ninth Coffeebar cafe, in Sunnyvale.
“When you’re a community-focused, hospitality-minded group, like we strive to be, it does keep you present,” Buchheister said. “I’ve always said that you can’t be any more present than when you’re behind a coffee machine making coffee for hundreds of people every morning. You have these moments with people, and that’s what fills my cup.”
Coffeebar, 401 Willow Ave., Sunnyvale; Instagram: @coffeebar. Beginning Nov. 11, open 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. Extended hours (6 a.m. to 8 p.m.) beginning later.
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