A few years ago, my 2006 Camry stopped playing music from my phone. While this development initially felt devastating, I quickly came to appreciate the experience of relying on the same ten CDs. Infinite options are nice; sometimes it’s better just to have the edit.
Something of this idea is at work at Soif, a new downtown Durham coffeeshop-meets-bar, in that its postage stamp size, at 593 square feet, ruled out most permutations of what kind of bar it could be—leaving what’s there pared down and sharper for it.
Soif, which opens at 331 West Main Street in early March, will serve coffee during the day and flip to serving spritzers and cocktails at night. It’s the latest spot from Jesse Gerstl, who also owns natural wine bar Delafia on South Roxboro Street.
Housed in a narrow chamber off the lobby of the Snow Building, a 1930s art deco building with offices on the floors above, Soif is intimate to the point that setting up a laptop might feel like projecting a presentation to the room; therefore, it does not have Wi-Fi. There’s limited space behind the bar for a spread of bottles and pumps; therefore, Soif offers basic espresso drinks without a range of flavored syrup options.
That’s not to say it’s austere. Soif has the vibe of a place you duck into when you want your day to feel slightly more cinematic: a checkered black-and-cream tile floor, tiered glass pendant lights that mirror the building’s original fixtures, gently tessellated wallpaper, 13 seats, a standing rail, and a couple of tables out in the lobby. It’s not trying to be the highest-end cup in Durham, and Gerstl said prices will reflect that.
In the evening, the menu will shift from coffee to non-alcoholic cocktails, low-ABV drinks built around sherry, vermouth, and other aperitifs, and three full-strength cocktails: a Manhattan, a Negroni, and a Martini. The wine list will include one white, one red, and one sparkling.
Gerstl told me he found the space first, then worked the concept around it. What made sense, he decided, was something modeled after coffee bars where he grew up, in Italy, where the bar is the center of the community and “everyone starts their day standing at the counter talking about sports or politics or whatever’s going on around town.”
“I think how we structure coffee shops in the U.S., where you walk in and you wait in line, and order at a cash register and then wait on the other side for your drink to be ready—it doesn’t create the atmosphere for, like, ‘let’s share this morning ritual together,’” Gerstl said.
At Soif, there’s no register at one end and pickup counter at the other. The idea is that, whether it’s 8 a.m. or 8 p.m., you walk up to the bar, order from the bartender, and stay where you are, flipping through the newspaper or talking to the person next to you.
Whether people actually want that level of proximity to strangers in a slightly anti-social era is, Gerstl conceded, an open question.
“I’m not sure if anybody actually wants what I want from my morning coffee experience,” he said. “Maybe that is how people are going to feel, like people are too close.”
But, he added, “when you have 593 square feet and 13 seats, it’s okay to not try to please every single person.”
Also, though: in bars, as in most things, having a strong sense of what you are and not losing sleep over what you’re not tends to be exactly what draws people in—which is to say that not trying to please everyone might be the surest way to end up pleasing a lot of people.
Case in point: Delafia, which Gerstl opened a year and a half ago as, essentially, a place for friends to come hang out and drink “natty wine,” has become one of the more popular bars in Durham. It’s a snug space with a wee astroturf patio out back, and most customers end up sitting at the bar and chatting with whoever’s around.
“Every day I’m shocked that people come into that place,” Gerstl said. “I don’t know if it has anything to do with wine. I think mostly people like that it’s just a different thing for Durham—a little bit darker, and just its own unique thing.”
Soif shares a sensibility with Delafia. Both occupy former barber shops. Neither has an immediately-clear-how-to-pronounce name: Delafia (“deh-luh-fee-ya”) is an untranslatable bit of hyperlocal Tuscan slang, while Soif (“swaff”), which means “thirst” in French, is further obscured by a logo that splits the word in two—SO / IF. Gerstl cheerfully expects people to misread the name as “so if.”
Both bars were also designed to be run by a single bartender. Adam Sobsey, who has been behind the bar at Delafia since it opened, will be the opening bartender at Soif.
The one-bartender model is part of what lets a place like Soif exist without the pressure to pack the room every night, said Gerstl. With labor costs low, Soif doesn’t need to be a hit; it just needs to be itself. And if Delafia is any indication, that quiet confidence is what will end up making people want to come back.
Soif will be open six days a week, closed Sundays. Hours run 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays and to midnight on weekends.
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