Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Smith Mountain Lake coffee shop on 'Solid Ground'
The story of how the owners of this Smith Mountain Lake coffee shop became business partners has a lot to do with smarts and determination.
Photos by Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times
Carkin prepares two house salads at the shop, which also sells soups, sandwiches, espresso (below) and other coffee drinks.
Solid Ground owner and brew master Chris Spoon pours a cappuccino Tuesday in Hardy. Spoon along with business partner Robert Carkin opened the establishment in April.
Food writer Lindsey Nair
- lindsey.nair@roanoke.com | (540) 981-3343
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Christopher Spoon and Robert Carkin never viewed a coffee-shop counter as the expressway to career satisfaction.
It was actually with some chagrin that they each accepted jobs at Mill Mountain Coffee and Tea, but they needed paychecks.
The story of how they became business partners and opened Solid Ground Coffee & Tea at Smith Mountain Lake this year has a little to do with chance and a lot to do with smarts and determination.
"I believe myself capable of doing absolutely anything," Spoon told me.
It started with a question
Spoon's confidence is what drove the Salem High School graduate, now 28, to join the Army at age 22. He was about to deploy to Iraq when a training accident left both knees badly injured.
He was medically discharged and told he'd probably never squat or jump again. Back in the Roanoke Valley for rehabilitation, he took a job at Mill Mountain Coffee and Tea on Starkey Road to pay bills.
"I said I would never work at a coffee shop," said Spoon, a singer/songwriter who played solo gigs around town before joining the Army.
But work he did. And when a customer one day asked him a specific question about a coffee blend and Spoon didn't know the answer, he said, "it really irked me."
He set out to learn everything he could about coffee. He calls himself the kind of person who can't do anything halfway, so he learned a lot, such as how some beans are more acidy than others, how some have natural sweetness or smoothness, and where certain varieties originated.
"I ate a lot of beans," he said.
Photos by Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times
Solid Ground owner and brew master Chris Spoon pours a cappuccino Tuesday in Hardy. Spoon along with business partner Robert Carkin opened the establishment in April.
Carkin prepares two house salads at the shop, which also sells soups, sandwiches, espresso (below) and other coffee drinks.
He started begging his boss to teach him how to roast coffee. Eventually she did, and then he was offered a management position at the Daleville store.
One day, an emergency medical technician commented that he and some of his co-workers liked coffee and sometimes desperately needed the caffeine boost, but they didn't like a super-strong, almost burned flavor.
"I pulled a chair up in front of the big wall of coffees in Botetourt and I just stared at it and stared at it," Spoon said. "I basically took a bunch of coffees that I enjoyed the attributes of ... and it just ended up being so good right from the get-go that we never changed it. And luckily we wrote everything down."
The EMT had already suggested the perfect name: IV Drip. It became a popular blend at the Botetourt store, and when Spoon was transferred to the Salem Mill Mountain Coffee and Tea, he took it with him.
Spoon calls his development of IV Drip a "Hail Mary." It just happened to turn out well.
Now he's developing blends at Solid Ground and working on finding the ingredients he needs to make IV Drip. Sometimes, he says, it takes more than a dozen attempts to create the perfect brew.
Answering God's call
While Spoon was schooling himself on coffee, a fellow Salem High School graduate was getting schooled in the fine art of cooking.
Robert Carkin, now 24, honed an interest in food through a school club called the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America. He won a state FCCLA cooking contest and competed in the nationals. When he graduated from high school, he went straight to the Culinary Institute of America in New York, earning a bachelor's degree.
He interned at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, then worked in New York as a pastry assistant at a restaurant called Terrapin and as a personal chef for a wealthy London family visiting America.
But the big-city lifestyle was not conducive to a Christian lifestyle, he said. Returning to Salem was "God's calling."
Working as a barista isn't the ideal job for a CIA grad, but it was the only one he could find at the time, he said. After working a while at the Salem Mill Mountain location, he started creating sandwiches such as the Peary Gouda with pears, smoked gouda cheese, field greens and sweet vidalia vinaigrette on ciabatta bread. That's also where he met Spoon (who, by the way, can squat and jump now).
The two eventually got tired of working for someone else, so Spoon asked Carkin to write up a business plan for their own shop. Carkin only had to go as far as his car to retrieve his 67-page business plan.
He'd been carrying it around since culinary school.
Yin and Yang
Spoon is fair-skinned and fair-haired with a highly caffeinated disposition. Carkin has dark hair, brooding eyes and a calm, soft voice.
The secret to their success at Solid Ground, located in a former coffee shop at Westlake Plaza in Hardy, is the "yin and yang thing," Carkin said.
Spoon agreed: "He's not going to try and second-guess me on my coffee, and I'm not going to bother him about his food," he said.
Spoon roasts his own coffee in the garage of his Roanoke home. He's also starting a sideline business called Honest Coffee Roasters and is working on gathering clients.
He can tell you that coffee should sit 24 hours between the time it's roasted and brewed. And that coffee has more flavor-producing compounds than wine. And that roasting the beans actually reduces the amount of caffeine in them.
He just loves to talk coffee.
"I relish those moments when people want to start talking about the coffee. Great coffee can fix the worst day," he said. "My personal mission in life is to ruin people's palates for bad coffee."
Carkin, meanwhile, has developed a modest menu of sandwiches, salads and soups for the shop. The Peary Gouda is a popular order; it comes on house-made focaccia.
Also homemade are the muffins and scones, chocolate chip cookies and some of the soups.
Spoon isn't the only one who already can picture his future. Carkin is starting a catering company out of Solid Ground called Catering by Strato, and within five years he would like to start a bistro called "Strato," which means "layer" in Italian.
"If there was one word to summarize my cooking, that's it," Carkin said.
Both men said they believe it's important to aim high, especially because they still don't see themselves behind a coffee-shop counter for the rest of their lives. But that's not to say they haven't earned an appreciation for the job.
"I am not in this to make millions of dollars," Spoon said. "I would rather take people who are really passionate about working with coffee and give them a home."
Lindsey Nair's column runs in Wednesday's Extra.
