Today we’d like to introduce you to Lara and Nicole Miele.
Lara and Nicole, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Food and cooking has always been our passion. Lara is an avid home cook and watches all the food TV shows and networks out there. If she could do it all over again I think she probably would have gone to culinary school.
About 2 years ago we spent 14 days in Italy for our honeymoon. We started talking about other places we wanted to travel, foods we wanted to try from different cultures and what we want to do in the future personally and professionally. On that trip we were inspired and realized that food was the answer. After spending lots of time at quaint little cafes and Mom & Pop restaurants in Italy we knew that a cafe would be our next adventure.
Since moving to Dorchester about 7 years ago we had always said, how nice would it be to have a little coffee shop or ‘farm-to-table’ cafe in our neighborhood. And 2 years later here we are. It took a lot of time, planning, help and support from friends and family, mentoring, money of course and there were some snags along the way but finally on August 6th, 2017 we opened!
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Oh boy, where to start?!
I wouldn’t call the process smooth. We had to overcome some potholes, bumps and sometimes what seemed like mountains 🙂
We had a phenomenal contractor who was a family friend who provided great guidance along the way. The hard part for us since we’ve never been business owners was the HUGE learning curve on how to get a business set up, from registering our company on all the various state and federal sites, setting up a payroll and accounting system, selecting a point-of-sale system, trying to find out the different permits/ licenses we need, sourcing from the right local farms/ suppliers to stay true to our philosophy but trying to stay affordable and at the same time profitable, the list goes on! Not to mention the permitting process takes a long time. Fortunately for all these ‘struggles’ we had awesome people surrounding us to help.
Please tell us about Honeycomb Cafe.
Honeycomb Cafe provides scratch-made breakfast and lunch options sourced from local/ sustainable farms and suppliers.
Similarly to how we’ve eaten for a long time, we want our customers to know where their food comes from and we want them to feel good about eating it. We are proud to partner with local farms and suppliers who share our philosophy on sustainability. Our food is clean, simple and prepared with love.
I think our whole cafe concept (using locally sourced ingredients) sets us apart in our neighborhood. We use a flash-brew method for our iced coffee which creates a much smoother/ creamer taste which we can thank our coffee roaster (Union Coffee) for sharing this technique.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Not a whole lot actually. The one thing that comes to mind that we’d do differently (if we decided to open another cafe) would be to have our contractor manage the permitting process for us. It was so hard to manage all the paperwork needed for various departments and to get away from work since we both worked full time (Lara as a PE teacher and Nicole at a Pharma company).
Contact Info:
- Address: 107-109 Savin Hill Ave
Dorchester, MA 02125 - Website: https://www.honeycombcafe.biz/
- Phone: 617-282-5400
- Email: honeycombsavinhill@gmail.com
Image Credit:
Nicole Miele
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