How ‘a kid that had no business opening up a coffee shop’ ended up owning seven of them

The vast restaurant space on the ground floor of an apartment building beneath the Ben Franklin Bridge looks more like a library than the retail store it once was.

At Almost Home, which opened last month in Old City, plush seating and a coffee table fashioned from a steamer trunk are set up beneath the stacks. A small room to one side offers turntables and headphones. In the rear is a coffee counter and service bar. In front is a 60-seat dining room where, through floor-to-ceiling windows, customers can drink smoked maple lattes, espressos, and two kinds of pourovers while watching cars zipping along Race Street toward I-95 or headed down Second Street as bridge traffic rumbles above.

Almost Home, formally Almost Home General, replaces United by Blue, an outdoors retailer that served a lighter menu.

Owner Robbie Doran has positioned it as a community hang. Besides the music room and free Wi-Fi, there are breakfast, brunch, and lunch cafe options from a scratch kitchen, and — three nights a week — full-service dinner. Doran roasts his own coffee. Cocktails are available, too, part of an arrangement with GLU Hospitality, whose partners Derek Gibbons and Tim Lu are friends from Doran’s days as liquor mogul, running Devotion Spirits in New York.

This is Doran’s seventh location of Almost Home in 3½ years, since he replaced a deli in Lincroft, N.J. The other shops, serving a more limited menu, are scattered through North Jersey, mainly in Monmouth County and the Jersey Shore. A smaller outpost is due to open soon at Hagert & York, a new luxury apartment building in Kensington. The goal is 15 by the end of 2024, and 30 by the end of 2025.

The business has grown largely through word-of-mouth, Doran said. “It was just a lot of locals, friends, and grassroots marketing,” he said. “I think it’s just been people falling in love with a kid that had no business opening up a coffee shop and cafe, and no experience in the restaurant industry besides selling booze.”

The breakfast, lunch, and coffee menus are full of twists. There are the standard sandwiches, plus one with tempura-fried scrapple, olive oil-poached egg, truffle fondue, and potato sticks on a hoagie roll. There’s a sandwich called beef shank redemption that puts roast beef, tiger sauce, and spicy pepper jack cheese on a poppy seed kaiser roll. Among the drinks is a shaken espresso, where vanilla and cinnamon are added to a double espresso and a choice of milk; it’s shaken, as you might expect, and poured over ice. Cocktails include the brunch standards as well as the classics, such as an old fashioned, margarita, and French 75.

Chef Nihad Hajdarhodzic is in the third week of dinner Thursday to Sunday. The menu, not posted online, is a tight collection of smaller and larger plates, all priced around $20. There’s a salade Nicoise, yellowtail tuna crudo, and a 6-ounce smash burger. One recent special was a spring pasta dish with local purple trumpet mushrooms, purple peas, Trevisan radicchio, tricolor local tomatoes, red sorrel, and mustard greens, tossed with Agrumato lemon extra virgin olive oil.

Doran, 35, who grew up in Rumson, N.J., took a winding route to his career as a coffee-shop magnate.

After eight years in the liquor industry, “I got exhausted from that scene,” he said. He moved to Asia in 2019, making his way to Vietnam and Thailand. “I worked on a coffee farm and got into the [coffee] lifestyle and culture that’s really big in the Eastern Hemisphere,” he said. “It’s not a fast grab-and-go. It’s more of a ‘come in, have coffee, sit down, enjoy, speak to whoever’ and really take it all in.”

In early 2020, Doran flew back to the States with hopes of launching a coffee business. He rented an apartment in Florida and drafted a business plan for a shop in North Jersey.

Rather than fly to New Jersey, he decided to ride his bike, raising money for small businesses affected by the pandemic: 1,800 miles, 18 days of riding, $35,000, he said.

“Every night, I’d call my mom and everybody, and they’d say, ‘Rob, you’re one day closer. You’re almost home.’”

He had the name.

Almost Home, 205 Race St. Hours: 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday to Wednesday, 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday to Saturday.