It’s official: Food + Drink has been rechristened Dopo Pizza & Pasta.
Dopo means “after” in Italian, because our new pizza restaurant is the place you go after your Coffeebar-fueled day is over.
“Food + Drink was like an award-winning movie,” explains Greg, our founder. In fact, the legendary pizza landed us the honor of being named 2021’s #12 restaurant in the US by Yelp. “Dopo is the sequel. And a good sequel tells a new story while preserving what you loved about the original.”
Greg’s unrequited love affair with pizza is pretty famous around here. As a collegiate ski racer in Northern Italy, he went native, becoming an enthusiastic participant in the country’s morning-to-evening cafe culture.
“I loved starting the day with an espresso and pastry and ending it with a perfect pie, a super-fresh salad, and a glass of great wine,” he recounts. “It’s always been my dream to add that experience to Coffeebar someday.”
“Someday” arrived at the end of the pandemic shutdown. Discovering the year-old, cult-favorite midtown Reno pizza restaurant on the verge of closing, Greg, already a fan, did the only sensible thing: he bought it.
The cornerstone of Dopo is still amazing pizza—in keeping with a central tenet of the Coffeebar Ethos, “made from scratch, with love.”
“We know our crust is sacred to our fans, and now we’re making it with all-organic flour,” says Greg. Dopo will deliver fresh dough daily to the new Coffeebar McCarran, the first Coffeebar location where pizza is on the menu.
Into the belly of the feast
The Dopo vision doesn’t stop at incredible pizza. “In the beginning, it was all about carry-out. You can still get your favorite pie to go, but we really hope you’ll sit down, relax, and enjoy yourself,” says Eric, Dopo’s manager and a veteran Coffeebar hospitalian. “This restaurant is where we can fulfill the promise of Coffeebar’s culture of hospitality,” he says. “We’re creating a casual dining experience that’s comfortable and welcoming, but we’re raising the culinary bar, too.”
To that end we’re expanding the menu (launching this spring - stay tuned!), adding appetizers like a calabrian chile-spiced olive mix and candied nuts, as well as incredible homemade meatballs.
Dopo will have new salads, too, including trattoria favorites insalata mista and insalata caprese. There’s also a golden beet salad with goat cheese, shaved celery, fig, and toasted walnuts.
But the Dopo sequel will have even more in store. Pasta—handmade, in-house. The Fettuccine con Funghi is a luscious blend of mushrooms, sherry, and parmigiano reggiano; to put the “fun” in funghi, it’s finished with truffle butter. Tortelloni is studded with sausage and sauced with black pepper, parmigiano reggiano, butter and thyme. The Fettuccine di Burro e Salvia features one of Italy’s greatest gifts to the world: crispy sage in brown butter.
So what is there to drink? We’re happy you asked.
Dopo’s full bar means that you can begin your evening with an aperitivo (Negroni, anyone?) or end your dinner with a digestivo—maybe the beautiful Corretto created by Reno’s own Ferino Distillery, which combines Coffeebar’s single-origin espresso beans with grape-based brandy. Brightening our ultra-fresh craft cocktails are housemade limoncello and triple sec.
And last but not least there’s Italian wine. It’s another one of Greg’s passions, and it inspired him to form a creative collaboration with a winery near Radda in Chianti which blends our house Sangiovese. In the tradition of our coffee trips to origin, some of our team went to help with the harvest a few years ago.
With the help of August Wines, an importer that works with small wineries in Italy, we’ve sourced an appealing menu of delicious, well-priced wines, most from the Chianti region. Our commitment to vertical sourcing and sustainability doesn’t end at coffee—we’re proud to showcase bottles from amazing winemakers committed to small-yield, dry-farmed vineyards, as well as biodynamic producers.
In the Pie of the Beholder
We’ve always loved the “walls of fame” at New York pizza joints, lively collages of photos where a picture of Lenny Kravitz might be hanging alongside a snapshot of Joe From The Block.
Another heartfelt element of the Coffeebar ethos is, “Community is the family you choose”, and Dopo’s wall of fame honors the movers, shakers, farmers, and makers who have put Reno on the map—even some UNR mascots. (Because, well, costumes!) A planned monthly happy hour for local entrepreneurs will encourage even more moving and shaking.
Creative expression has always been a big part of Coffeebar interiors, and that’s true at Dopo too. Graffiti art signage over the bar is an homage to the street art of South Virginia Street in the 90s, which helped foster the city’s reputation as a graffiti, mural, and public art hot spot.
Studying the mysterious runes on Dopo’s mysterious black wallpaper? (Remind you of your last ayahuasca journey?) We love to hide “easter eggs” in our store designs, and this one’s an original pattern by our uber-talented graphic designer Ciara.
In sacred geometry, the circle is revered because all other geometric shapes are created from it.
There’s an undeniable resemblance between sacred geometry’s overlapping-circles “Flower of Life” symbol and a pizza. We like to think of it as The Flour of Life.
The Circle of (the Good) Life
A story we heard this week tells us that Greg’s vision of day-to-evening hospitality is ready for prime time. Dopo Bartender Nina was chatting with a couple who’d come in for dinner. They were excited about their experience and wanted to know the story behind the restaurant.
Nina explained that it was the latest creation from Coffeebar. She told them how we’d envisioned our guest journey: beginning the morning fueling up at Coffeebar and ending the day unwinding, Italian-style, at Dopo.
The couple looked at each other in surprise. “We’ve never been to Coffeebar or Dopo before,” they told her, “And that’s exactly what we did today!”
