Ad Astra’s 3 Kilogram Mill City coffee roaster that will be in the new location. Courtesy | Facebook 

Downtown Hillsdale will add a coffee and pizza shop in January.

Ad Astra Cafe and St. Joe’s Pizza will share a newly renovated space at 92 North Broad Street to create a European-style restaurant, according to Joshua Mincio, a former Hillsdale College student and former member of the Kehoe Family Initiative for Entrepreneurial Excellence. 

Mincio will partner in the opening of the restaurant with Patrick Whalen, operations assistant to the president at the college.

“Patrick and I are each bringing our skill sets in to form a robust menu and experience,” Mincio said. “I am the bakery and pizza guy, and Patrick knows coffee better than anyone else around, so we are collaborating to bring all of these things together in one restaurant.”

From the same counter, customers will be able to order coffee and baked goods all day as well as pizza at lunch and dinner, Mincio said.

Whalen has owned and operated Ad Astra Coffee Roasters, Hillsdale’s only local coffee roaster, for five years. The company currently operates an online store and provides coffee to the Knorr Family Dining Room.

“Our new cafe will invite folks to experience the freshest coffee in town,” Whalen said. “You’ll be able to sip an expertly roasted and brewed single origin coffee while sitting near our bright red 3 kilo Mill City roaster as it roasts another batch.”

According to Whalen, Ad Astra is focused on ethical sourcing and the craft of coffee.

“You can trust the coffee you are drinking came from a small farm or co-op and has been sample roasted until we’re confident we are unlocking all the potential in the bean,” Whalen said. “What we are not is a distant, anonymous, industrial roaster masquerading as socially engaged in order to sell more crummy coffee. We’re veteran-owned, we all live in Hillsdale, and we take a craftsman’s approach to our trade.”

While Ad Astra has been in operation for several years, Mincio will launch a new business when he opens St. Joe’s Pizza. With years of experience working in bakeries and pizzerias across the country, Mincio has been building his new business for the past two years.

The name of the pizzeria combines the patronage of Saint Joseph with a nod to a local landmark, the Saint Joseph River. 

St. Joe’s will be the only wood-fired pizzeria in the area and will source ingredients locally, according to Mincio.

“We’ll have high quality pizza, we’ll have high quality coffee in a really beautiful space,” Mincio said. “The goal is to combine the integrity of the products we have – dough made fresh, naturally fermented sourdough, sourcing vegetables from local farmers – with a really beautiful space right in downtown.”

Mincio said that he has been working with Luke Robson ’17, a Hillsdale alumnus who owns Hillsdale Renaissance LLC, to renovate the space in preparation for the opening of the businesses.

“The college does beautiful things and builds beautiful buildings, but my goal was to try to do that for the town as well,” Mincio said.

According to Mincio, he and Whalen met when they both worked at St. Martin’s Academy, a Catholic boarding school for boys in Fort Scott, Kansas. 

“He had his coffee business operational,” Mincio said. “I worked in the kitchen there. I baked bread for the school. So we already had a history of working together. I knew his work ethic, and he knew mine.”

Mincio said he and Whalen formulated the idea of a European style coffee shop and restaurant four years ago, inspired by author Ernest Hemingway.

“Hemingway would sit in these Parisian cafes and read and write, write about the people he sees and write his novels,” Mincio said. “‘A Moveable Feast’ is a memoir he wrote. It’s about himself. He wrote it toward the end of his career, but it’s about him getting started, so he’s a young journalist. He would basically sit in a cafe and drink a lot of Vermouth and write. We wanted a space that’s not the college, not Rough Draft, where you can buy good food and spend the day if you’re an aspiring writer.”

Because the hours of operation for a coffee shop and a pizzeria don’t necessarily overlap, Mincio said that sharing the space and combining their two business made sense both financially and in terms of dividing labor. 

Ken Koopmans, executive director of Career Services, advised Mincio during his time in the Kehoe Initiative and throughout the process of building his business. 

“I think both Patrick and Josh have an eye toward localism, and I think they’re probably good business partners in that way,” Koopmans said. “I think they are two guys with high character that are looking to run a business in a way that aligns with the Kehoe entrepreneurship program but also just aligned with the college and how we want our graduates to run a business.”