Specialty coffee shop with focus on all-day breakfast opens Saturday

Oct. 11, 2019

La Luna Cafe opens Saturday along the boardwalk of The Cascade on North Phillips Avenue, offering specialty coffee drinks, toast, waffles, yogurt, salads and a daily soup.

“I hope that this place is somewhere that people can come in and hang out essentially, especially college students or people who do freelance work and don’t have offices,” manager Salvador Jaimes said. “We want to offer people somewhere to come and hang out, chill, eat or do their work.”

The space is bright, with floor-to-ceiling windows on the east side looking out to Falls Park West and on the west side facing the future courtyard for the mixed-use complex, which includes apartments and other businesses, including Severance Brewing Co. and Candy Cloud Factory. Inside the coffee shop, there’s seating for about 50 customers, with a variety of options: at high-top bars, around tables or in comfy chairs with coffee tables.

Jaimes’ parents, Salvador and Edith, own the new cafe. His sister, Tatiana, who is in college, will serve as a part-time manager. The couple owned several restaurants in their native El Salvador and now serve as pastors at Restoration in Christ Church.

The coffee shop, which has been a dream of her father’s, Tatiana said, will serve everything from black drip and French press to espresso drinks.

“We wanted to make very innovative, unique, flavorful lattes, so the two most unique to us are the Ay Caramba and the horchata latte,” Tatiana Jaimes said. “Horchata is a very staple Hispanic drink that is rice milk based, and we were able to incorporate that into a latte. Our Ay Caramba is ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, honey. The reason why we did the Ay Caramba is just because ‘ay caramba’ is a really fun saying in Spanish. Like if you’re excited, ‘ay caramba’ or if something shocks you, ‘ay caramba.’ And we wanted to play around with the names and the ingredients.”

The namesake latte, La Luna, is raspberry and white chocolate.

For food, there are a variety of toasts, with choices such as the Rose Garden, which is similar to a BLT, the Caprese Avocado and the Jungle Jam, which is peanut butter and banana. Waffle options are Belgian, bacon-infused and horchata. The menu also offers four salads, two yogurt bowls and a soup that will change every day.

The full menu will be available all day.

“Depending on how Sioux Falls reacts to our menu, we’ll be constantly changing because we want to change with the city,” Tatiana Jaimes said.

They’re sourcing many of their products locally, with coffee beans from Coffea Roasterie and breads from Breadsmith.

“We want to support the community as much as possible because we love Sioux Falls,” she said. “There’s been so much support, so much outreach, and it’s crazy to me because when our idea first came to be, we’re like, ‘How are we going to do this? There’s so much happening; there’s so much to get done,’ but the community of Sioux Falls helped us out because they were bringing answers to us before we could even ask the question.”

Because they view the cafe as a gathering place, they also want to open it to the arts. They plan to display and sell works for local artists and invite musicians to perform.

“We’re looking a lot into musical performances, like live music, but we’ll also hoping that further on we’ll be able to host like poetry nights,” Tatiana Jaimes said.

La Luna at 701 N. Phillips Ave. will be open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday.

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Specialty coffee shop with focus on all-day breakfast opens Saturday

La Luna Cafe opens Saturday along the boardwalk of The Cascade on North Phillips Avenue, offering specialty coffee drinks, toast, waffles, yogurt, salads and a daily soup.

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