Fifteen years ago, Jodie Thorz Dawson and Kristine Petrik bought a barn full of roasting equipment in the Catskills, mostly on a hunch. What they built instead is something the town has come to rely on.
They tell the origin story themselves, and they tell it as a joke: a psychologist and a journalist walk into a coffee shop, and decide to buy it. There was no market research behind the decision, no business degree, no five-year plan — only a barn in Sullivan County, N.Y., stacked with someone else’s roasting equipment, and a sense that a cup of coffee might be the start of something larger than itself. Fifteen years later, that hunch has become Java Love Coffee Roasters: four storefronts scattered across Montclair, 1,800 pounds of coffee turned over every week, and a place in the town’s affections that most businesses spend decades angling for and never quite secure.
Thorz Dawson and Petrik were already Montclair people, with a second home up in the Catskills, when the roasting equipment came their way. Their first instinct was something civic, a small contribution to the economic life of Sullivan County. A friend who consults for restaurants talked them out of overthinking it. Do one thing. Do it well. So they did, and the thing they ended up doing well turned out to have very little to do with coffee, and a great deal to do with everything else.
From the start, Java Love became a refuge for people who hadn’t always felt entirely at ease walking into a job interview elsewhere. Applicants would arrive and announce their tattoos almost as a confession, bracing for the consequence. “We’re like, ‘That’s really cool,'” Thorz Dawson said. “They’re like, ‘Do we have to wear long sleeves?’ I’m like, ‘No.’ Come as you are. Be comfortable in your skin.” Some employees have stayed seven or eight years, a tenure that borders on the miraculous in an industry defined by churn. The “safe space” sign in the window predates the phrase’s current ubiquity; it has simply grown louder with time. “Over time with the political environment, we have leaned more into being a women-owned business, a gay-owned business,” Thorz Dawson said, “because that’s what the culture and the atmosphere has been calling us to do.”
The same instinct for making something out of what’s on hand is written, literally, into the walls of the Bellevue Avenue location. In the early years, before there was much of a supply chain or a plan beyond Sunday, the family packed up the minivan each week for the drive back to Montclair, and somewhere in the middle of the cargo there was always wood — barn wood, wood scavenged from friends, wood pulled off the side of the road. “The girls would be like, ‘Why do we have stinky wood in the car?'” Petrik recalled. “And we were like, ‘It’s going on the walls of Bellevue.'” It did. The benches are built from the pallets their coffee shipped on. The burlap on the walls is the same burlap the beans arrive in. The front of the counter is a salvaged shipping container, pulled from a pile headed for the dump. “Everything is upcycled, recycled as much as we can,” Petrik said — and out of all of it, Montclair got a beautiful coffee shop.
Thorz Dawson and Petrik are quick to puncture the town’s reputation as an easy place to do business. “I think people think, ‘Oh, Montclair, there’s money. There are a lot of people. People are killing it in Montclair,'” Thorz Dawson said. “No. It’s just not that. It’s still a lot of hard work, a lot of cultivation, a lot of building of customers, of loyalty.” When Java Love opened, there were only a handful of places in town to get a serious cup of coffee; that number has grown considerably since. What has kept Java Love central to that conversation, Petrik said, has less to do with strategy than with something simpler. “Coffee is just the vehicle for us to get to do what we want to do,” she said. What they want to do, fifteen years in, hasn’t changed: put love into the world, have a positive impact on the community. The coffee, as it happens, is also very good.
Ask them what fifteen years, 1,800 pounds of coffee a week and a minivan’s worth of Catskills barn wood add up to, and neither hesitate. “Gratitude,” Thorz Dawson said. “Because we wouldn’t be able to do any of this without our team, our children, each other, this community. We’re still here after fifteen years doing this unexpected business. So I think just grateful for the support and for people loving Java Love.”
Java Love Coffee Roasters has locations on Church Street, Bellevue Avenue and Glenridge Avenue in Montclair, and on the Montclair State University campus. This month, the shop has been running a collaboration with The Montclair Pod: limited-edition Pride stickers on select iced drinks at all four locations through June, each carrying a QR code that links to the newsletter, with one subscriber to win a $50 Java Love gift card. The giveaway closes July 1 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern; the winner will be announced July 15. Entrants must be 18 or older and U.S. residents; one entry per subscriber, no purchase necessary.
