Beyu Caffe, one of Durham’s OG Black businesses, shutters its flagship location amidst a changing downtown.
Regulars of Beyu Caffe, a restaurant and coffee bar founded by Dorian Bolden, poured into the space to get one last taste of the classic Southern-style cuisine before Beyu closed the doors to its downtown location for good.
Bolden had made the announcement a week earlier, on June 11, that Juneteenth would be Beyu’s final day at 341 West Main Street.
“Downtown Durham has been our home and heart,” Bolden wrote in a candid Instagram post, “but with changing dynamics such as high parking rates, ongoing construction, and the impact of remote work, we’ve seen a significant drop in activity that we can no longer sustain.”
On July 3, Bolden also announced that he’s closing Beyu’s Boxyard RTP location.
Bolden was among a pack of business owners who implored Durham city council to do more to support the flailing downtown business district during a city council work session on May 23. Parking, construction, and a dearth of foot traffic—the same issues cited in Beyu’s closing announcement—were true for Toast, Beyu’s neighbor, Rubies on Five Points, and other local business owners for other local business owners who spoke up.
At that work session, council members, led by Durham’s small business-owning mayor, Leo Williams, insisted that voices were heard and changes were on the way, once the council returned from its summer break in August.
But for Bolden, who holds a bachelor’s in business from Duke and opened the restaurant in 2009, the writing was already on the wall. Those changes, if they came, just wouldn’t come soon enough. It was time, he says, to move Beyu Caffe in a different direction. He says the team will continue to invest in “Beyu Blue,” a coffee shop on Duke’s campus, and in Beyu’s outpost at the Raleigh-Durham Airport (RDU) location. The coffee bean retail operation, which has beans sold in local Food Lions, is also expanding.
“When looking at market dynamics, [the cafe] reflects a 35 percent drop in dine-in traffic in one year,” Bolden tells the INDY. “It’s getting worse year over year. Thank God my wife and I own our space because we’ve been able to figure out a way to subsidize it—but at some point, we got to treat Beyu as a regular tenant.”
Beyu has been a staple of downtown Durham for over a decade, but shifting market forces and a change in consumer habits, post-pandemic, created conditions difficult for any business to thrive in. A consequential shift in the restaurant’s vision, back in 2019, also cut down on business.
Music and makers
Beyu Caffe first opened its doors, originally at 335 West Main Street, in late 2009. Bolden was an early adopter in the promise of Durham’s downtown revitalization; at the time, one of the key features of the space was a tiny nook in the front corner of the restaurant called the “smoffice”—a 20-by-20 coworking space in partnership with the Durham Chamber of Commerce. It was intended to be an opportunity for community building, a value at the core of Bolden’s mission for Beyu. The winners of the smoffice, a trio of sisters, eventually founded the Makery, a shop for selling handmade local goods that closed in 2020.
In 2015, Bolden saw an opportunity to solidify Beyu’s future downtown. He ran a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to buy a new space at 341 West Main Street. This new location offered more dynamic space, including a small stage where Beyu began hosting live jazz nights. Cicely Mitchell, founder of the Art of Cool Project and owner of the newly-opened downtown jazz venue, Missy Lane’s Assembly Room, helped book the shows.
“He gave me my first start at booking in mass,” Mitchell says of Bolden. “It’s one thing to book for a festival, right, a one-off for the year. It’s another to book weekend after weekend. I believe that if I had not had that opportunity, there would be no way to be able to book at the scale that we book now [for Missy Lane’s].”
At the time, downtown Durham was flourishing, and Beyu Caffe was one of its anchors. During the day, as one of the few downtown businesses that served breakfast, it was a go-to for the city’s growing community of tech workers. At sundown, the restaurant transformed into Durham’s premier jazz club, catering to a largely Black audience with few spaces they could call their own in downtown.
Alan Thompson, a saxophone player and keyboardist, performed at Beyu Caffe with his band Zoocrü on a number of occasions.
“For me as a music major, specifically as a Jazz Studies major at North Carolina Central, it was encouraged to go downtown, because that’s where the music was,” Thompson told the INDY. “Beyu was a venue that if you wanted to get your stripes as a musician in Durham, especially in that jazz scene, you had to play at Beyu. That was almost like your rite of passage.”
And while Mitchell routinely booked local showcases at Beyu, she was also cultivating a nationally recognized Black music festival that attracted musicians in the upper echelon of jazz, funk, neo-soul, and hip-hop to Durham annually. The Bull City—interconnected with NCCU’s renowned jazz studies program—was synonymous with jazz music during the mid-2010s. Beyu was at the center.
But juggling both food and music became difficult, Bolden says, and he soon faced a crossroads: Keep the jazz or focus on the restaurant. He chose to scale back the former.
“We were doing every single [menu] part and trying to manage [live music]. It just wasn’t sustainable,” Bolden says. “Both were technically very successful so we had to pick one. It’s like well, do we pick the breakfast-lunch-coffee concept or do we go with the live music venue destination concept? When we announced at the time, it was a lot of soul-searching to really go back to who we were and why I created Beyu as a coffee gathering place.”
But few places in downtown Durham catered to the audience that Beyu had brought together for its jazz nights. Without the performances, a subset of Beyu’s audience felt distanced, according to some former patrons.
“Personally, when I thought of Beyu, I never really thought of food, I never thought of coffee, I always thought about music,” Thompson told the INDY. “I think a lot of people had that same sentiment. So I wasn’t surprised when they took live music from the picture that maybe a lot of their core following also left or looked for other places that offered music.”
Bolden says that he is at peace with his decision but, with hindsight, would have taken a different approach to discontinuing music.
“I think that my biggest regret is cutting it off versus scaling it back,” Bolden says. “But that’s how experience is made.”
A changing downtown
After ending the regular live jazz nights, Bolden doubled down on coffee and in 2018 Beyu opened a second location, Beyu Blue, on Duke University’s campus. During the onset of COVID-19, Bolden expanded the business’s community vision with the Beyu Food Project, an alliance of downtown Durham businesses that provided meals for families in need.
The coffee shop continued to grow in the coming years and Beyu was an early adopter, once again, when it opened as one of the first businesses at Boxyard RTP in 2021. Last year, Beyu Caffe spread its wings and landed a location at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport.
But back home at Beyu’s flagship restaurant, changes in city policy around issues like parking proved to be difficult to navigate. Increased parking rates made patronizing Beyu and other downtown businesses more costly, even as those businesses needed to raise rates to keep up with inflated costs. Bolden has also found that business has slowed, and people are still less likely to go out following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s hard to do a small business,” Mitchell says. “Putting your own money in, your own savings— That takes bravery. 14 years is a great run to be able to do that.”
Downtown traffic has also proved unsustainable for newer businesses to the scene, like Glori, a Black-owned bar in the Kress building that closed in April, as well as stalwarts like Beyu.
The May 23 work session was the final straw.
“When I look at something that’s draining other businesses trying to stay afloat, at some point, I have to do due diligence,” Bolden says, “I can’t keep pulling from other things. If there’s no positive end in sight—and that was the message I got from the city council session—there was no positive end in sight for us to continue the bloodbath. So it was like, ‘Oh, well, then it’s an easy decision. I’ll be the first and I’m out.’”
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