On a recent late-winter day, I entered the glass door of 3hree Café on Springfield’s Belmont Avenue in Forest Park, where the proud new owner, Cathie Albrecht, was busily on the phone arranging an appointment. She had just recently purchased the storefront and was preparing it for her soft opening this week.

Papers were spread out on one of the café’s square wooden tables, along with a food catalog, keys, a cell phone, a land line phone, and a bag from the Holyoke Mall Albrecht had recently received from a friend in town.

Inside the bag was a gift from someone Albrecht credits for helping her relocate to the café. It was a small ceramic work of art she planned to set out prominently on the counter—a colorfully-glazed, decorative head and shoulders adorned with the word, “Chef.”

The gift was from Nancy Bristol, general manager of Kid Stuff at 1504 Allen Street, who had targeted Albrecht as a potential supplier of organic and gluten-free pizza dough and birthday cakes, something Albrecht specializes in at her home-based business in Wales, Auntie Cathie’s Kitchen.

“I don’t know how Kid Stuff actually found me,” Albrecht said. “But I said I’d be very interested.” Following up, Bristol asked to pay a visit around Thanksgiving last year, when the bakery was immersed in orders prior to the holiday. Albrecht asked to delay a meeting.

In lieu of one, Bristol submitted an order for two pies just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday. The Kid Stuff owner, Joe Bonavita, showed up in person to pick them up, saying he wanted to see if Albrecht could handle their orders, and that he wanted to assure that the food would be all natural.

Albrecht said she told him, “We use real butter, Cabot butter; we use King Arthur flour; we use organic oats. We use all natural ingredients, because we make everything from scratch, and there’s no lard, and whatever people make wholesale stuff with, which isn’t really good.”

Her pies went over well, she said, and next Albrecht was asked to supply sample cakes. She got the job.

One day, after delivering an order, Albrecht said, Bristol recommended that she deliver samples to a few additional places around town. She gave Albrecht a bunch of business cards to get her started. But there was one business she didn’t have a card for.

“‘It’s called 3hree Café,’ Albrecht recounts Bristol telling her. ‘These guys came and opened it from California—they own a mansion.’ She started telling me this because at the bakery, we have a house built in 1733. We started doing what we call quiet dinners in our dining room. People come at night, and we serve them a five-course meal—you can bring your own wine—and this is what these [3hree] guys wanted to do.”

Bristol saw something in common, and urged Albrecht to talk to the 3hree Café owners—who, little did they know at the time, had already closed up shop in October due to personal circumstances that led them to return to California, leaving their café vacant.

“I was looking them up,” Albrecht said, “and that’s when I found your article. And then I found the article where it said they had closed.”

Albrecht emailed me on New Year’s Day to ask about the closure, saying she had wanted to visit 3hree for breakfast and was disappointed. “What happened?” she wrote. “The place sounded great, just the kind of food we like.” I responded immediately to let her know the place was not just closed, but also for sale. My fond thoughts about the place, and the hopes that someone might reopen it, prompted me to write a January 9 piece about the importance of third places.

Albrecht told me she and her husband were considering relocating, of all things, from their spot “in the middle of nowhere.” She was curious about the neighborhood surrounding 3hree Café.

“Is it a ‘not so good’ neighborhood, or is it up and coming?” she asked, a question to handle carefully, since it’s not necessarily a spot for just any entrepreneur. Albrecht asked for “insight” on the area (pictured).

I tried to respond as honestly as possible, as I truly believe the café is situated competitively for the right kind of business, but it is not for the faint of heart or the totally uncertain.

I told Albrecht at the time she might want to talk to Belle Rita Novak, a nearby resident, manager of a local farmer’s market, and fellow baker who supplied brioches to 3hree Café in its few short months of operation last year. I was prepared for her interest to wane based on the somewhat gritty reality I tried to portray, as succinctly and perhaps even neutrally as I could, in my email.

“It would be nice to contact some other area farmers who may be interested in selling us organic produce and eggs,” Albrecht offered cheerfully in response, indicating her interest in following up with Novak. “We have our own organic gardens, which we use in the months we can, for all of our soups and sandwiches, but supplemental is always welcome.”

“I don’t know why, I was just really compelled to drive over here and look at it,” she said about her reaction to some of the ensuing email exchanges as she learned more about the place. In one email, Albrecht had told me she synchronously had jury duty in Springfield, and she would just stop by the storefront and peek through the windows.

“I wasn’t looking for another business,” she explained. “I mean, I’ve got my hands full over there [in Wales]. God knows why I’m doing this.” Albrecht wasn’t looking for the Kid Stuff contract, either. “Things happen that way,” she said, laughing. “People just show up.”

She visited the vacant café storefront based on her whim. “I looked in the window, and I was just like, oh my God, this place is awesome!” The owners had left on the window a phone number and a somewhat hasty note explaining the storefront’s availability. They apparently wanted someone to take over the place who would more or less keep it the way it was, and not just another pizza joint.

“I came home, and I talked to Ray [O'Dell, one of the former owners], and right away we hit it off. I said, ‘I’m sure you have other people who are interested.’”

One prospect, Albrecht recounted O’Dell telling her, wanted to make the café into a hair salon, and another wanted to make it into a pizza and/or hamburger place. “Sometimes, when you’re selling a business, you’ve just gotta look the other way, and not care what happens,” she said. But not in this case—the former 3hree guys held out for the right new owner.

Albrecht told O’Dell she liked their story and she liked the sound of their food, and there was something about the place that had a lot of charm. The price seemed a little high, maybe more than she could afford, but Albrecht’s husband encouraged her to take a look inside before making a decision.

Sometime later, she emailed to say she and her husband “fell in love with it.” She told me during our interview that the first words out of her husband’s mouth when they came in for a visit with a Sears Real Estate representative were, “This is the place that you’ve been dreaming about for as long as I’ve known you [eleven years]. This is it. It’s everything you’ve wanted.”

Auntie Cathie’s Kitchen in Wales (pictured, during early morning business hours), Albrecht said, is very rustic; it’s in a barn; she and her husband put it together themselves. It has no plumbing—customers use a portapotty outside. She’s very excited to have a café with a flushing toilet. And it’s no ordinary, run-of-the-mill bathroom, either, as you have to visit the café yourself to be able to see (photos don’t do it justice).

“This place, from the beginning, just made me want to come back again,” Albrecht said. “When you come here, when you pull up to this little strip, you look at this place, and you just say, oh, it’s a little restaurant.”

“But when you walk inside,” she continued, “it’s almost like it shuts you off from the outside. Does that make any sense? You get in here and you’re enveloped by the look and the feel. It feels good. It feels happy. Somebody put something into it, and you can feel that. Whatever these guys did to it, they put their heart and soul into this place, and that’s what you get.”

Albrecht told me in January that she and her husband considered the café “a great location for a kind of upscale breakfast and lunch place. If all things work out, we will keep part of their menu and maybe add a few things, so there is something for everyone.”

She said they have even considered opening the café for a fixed-price dinner a few nights a month, a strategy that has gone over well in Wales.

At the end of February, Albrecht was just a couple of weeks away from closing on her purchase when she offered samples of her baked goods at the annual meeting of the Forest Park Civic Association, after connecting with café neighbors who suggested the approach as a way to introduce herself to residents while she pursued her purchase of the café. Her food was a huge hit.

The civic association presented the former 3hree owners with a plaque last spring for providing beneficial community service to the neighborhood.

It reads, “For making the move from California because you loved a house in Forest Park and immediately became caring, informed and involved neighbors. And for having enough faith in the future of Forest Park and Springfield to open 3hree Café. We thank you.”

The former owners left the plaque behind in the small kitchen, where I was able to photograph it along with all the shiny, stainless steel appliances.

“I’m going to do my best to keep the same menu,” Albrecht said. “We’re going to keep mostly the same [items], but we’re going to add some of our own touches; we’re going to bring a lot of the baked goods. We do some really nice tarts, cakes, homemade pies.” She also does catering.

“We want people be able to come in, and say, ‘I’d like to order a birthday cake.’ I have a book they can order from. We do gluten-free baking, and I want to be able to offer that here, too. And I think more vegetarian.” She cited a simple Mediterranean salad she provides at her other bakery, including hummus, falafel and chick peas. The previous 3hree menu had a lot of beef and chicken, Mexican style.

“I love that,” Albrecht said. “We make this one sandwich—it’s like a turkey club sandwich, and it’s made like a quesadilla, and it’s awesome. So we want to do stuff like that here. We’ll change it a little, but we’d like to keep the same thing.”

In talking to O’Dell, Albrecht said he thought the two businesses would be a good marriage, since the former 3hree Café did not make a lot of baked goods. The new iteration will serve breakfast all day, and will provide custom items upon request.

“If you came in here and wanted something that isn’t on the menu, and we can make it, we would make it,” she said. Albrecht’s other bakery doesn’t even have a menu, but her customers return because she makes what they like. “She makes my poached egg on dry toast,” Albrecht said her customers tell themselves, and that’s why they come back for more.

Albrecht, a West Hartford native whose formal professional training is in finance as well as working her way up through high-end kitchens in Boston, makes a wicked good seven grain bread, tomato and ravioli soup, peach scone, and pumpkin muffin—all of which she generously provided to me as samples to take home. My children especially enjoyed the bread, toasted and buttered, and they look forward to visiting Springfield again so they can sample more of Albrecht’s goods. My husband savored the muffin, giving me the wide-eyed-while-chewing look he gives when he eats something that tastes very much homemade, the kind of food that goes to the heart as well as the belly.

“I don’t know if this is the ultimate place for me,” Albrecht said, “but this is the next step in the journey. It sounds kind of kooky, but that’s how I feel. Two years from now, I may be somewhere else, I don’t know. This place might be great. It might expand. Right now, I’m here today, and that’s all I can think of. I’m just going to take it where it goes.”

3hree Café, at 684 Belmont Avenue, is open for business 7:00 am to 3:00 pm Wednesday through Sunday, serving breakfast and lunch. It is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Albrecht plans a grand opening later this month. With questions, words of welcome, or orders, contact her at (413) 773-3332, or via 3hreecafe.com.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 11:52 am and is filed under City corridors, Community building, Development, Forest Park, Interviews, Photos, Quality of life, Springfield, Urban Compass, Walkability.