Roos Roast finally has its own cafe, though owner John Roos is reluctant to call it that. He calls it the Anti-Cafe. It has regular hours, sells espresso with or without steamed milk, and may eventually sell “kind of snackie sandwiches,” but he says: “The cafe thing is so overused. For awhile whenever any restaurant would open, it would be a cafe.”
The name also serves as a preemptive strike on pesky questions like why there are not fancier drinks, more tables and chairs, or other Starbuckian accoutrements (though there is, he emphasizes, plenty of free Wi-Fi). Seating consists of a scratched card table with four chairs and a black leather couch, which also serve as the Roos Roast employee lounge.
Roos moved his coffee roastery to Rosewood (off South Industrial) in 2009. You could always unofficially get a cup of joe there when you bought a pound of coffee, and semi-officially he gradually began letting anyone drop in and buy a cup, but recently he’s expanded his hours and his coffee-related merchandise and is ready to at least make it an official anti-cafe. By the way, there’s also plenty of parking, and you’re welcome to use it, though some fairly scary signs suggest the contrary. Roos says the landlord put the signs up to discourage football parking.
Roos is usually on premises, wearing a ski hat. “I’m a ski bum,” he says. “I got into restaurant world right after high school, and that sort of led to all this.” He graduated from Pioneer High in 1980 and moved out to Colorado, where he worked in restaurants to support his ski habit. After Colorado came a few years in Nice, France, then about a decade in Portland, Oregon, where he seriously discovered coffee. He came back to Ann Arbor in 2002 with a vague idea of opening a restaurant, but somehow never got past trying to perfect the coffee he would serve in it. Roos Roast’s signature blend is called Lobster Butter Love, because its decadently creamy richness reminds him of a lobster confit he makes.
Asked if his job involves traveling around the world, following the finest artisanal coffee harvests, he bursts out laughing: “That’s almost insane. You have to have a lot, I mean a lot, of money to do that kind thing. I’d rather buy coffee from around the world from people I trust. But ninety-five percent of our coffee is fair trade. That’s something, right?”
Roos Roast Anti-Cafe, 1155 Rosewood St., Suite B, 222-2902. Mon.-Fri. 7:30 a.m.-5 p.m. roosroast.com.
