Your favorite coffee shop closing is a good enough reason to cry.
By Brooklyn Rodgers | February 6th, 2025 | 3:40 pm
Yes- you read that correctly. I found myself tearing up today getting an iced oat milk lavender latte from the newly re-opened Snider Plaza Foxtrot in University Park. I wasn’t expecting to cry in this coffee shop, mostly I just wanted to stop in on the first day of their grand re-opening and grab one of the best lattes in town.
The coffee shop remained unchanged, and I was pleasantly surprised to see a few familiar faces in the baristas who were hustling around the shop. This Foxtrot, Snider Plaza, and University Park all mean a lot to me. I spent a year from April 2023 to April 2024 living a few blocks away from this Foxtrot in particular and visited it almost every day with my miniature dachshund, Fish, to grab coffee and loiter on their patio.
This Foxtrot and three other Foxtrots in Dallas closed suddenly around the same time I moved out of University Park much to the dismay of their customers and employees. In a very odd turn of events, these Foxtrots remained bolted up like time capsules, their organic, brightly branded goodies locked up, possibly to never be seen again.
Surprisingly, months later, Foxtrot announced a reorganization of leadership; whatever catastrophic fuckup caused them to close 33 locations around the country was resolved- some Foxtrots would be resurrected in the not-so-distant future. Almost a year later, two Foxtrots out of four in Dallas have reopened (Knox Henderson and Snider Plaza). The Uptown location was converted to a Berkley’s Market, and the Lower Greenville location remains shuttered.
I teared up in the University Park Foxtrot today because I never realized how much it meant to me as a place. In my new digs in Lower Greenville, I haven’t been able to find a coffee shop that compares (read my lamentations here), either in coffee quality, or overall experience.
And while the re-opening of a corporate coffee chain with national locations, questionable funding and fiduciary responsibility may not seem like a personal matter, for whatever reason, it touched my stupid little heart.
There is a lot of discourse from food writers in Dallas that places less emphasis (or no emphasis) on corporate restaurant concepts, that is until they close unexpectedly. Until now, I agreed with this discourse- what is there to say about these corporate chains with endless PR money, when we should be focusing on the mom-and-pop concepts that need us to talk about them, visit them, and spend our money there?
But now, I am reformed. Corporate chains have a place in our culinary landscape and act as real gathering places for people despite the national structure of their ownership or state besides Texas they filed their LLCs. That dumbass corporate chain means a lot to me, and seeing it full of people working, gathering, and living, made me happy. Maybe it’s time food writers show a little love to the corporate chains that bring us together, the workers they support, and the customers who patronize them.
Dallasites are many things, and one of them is sensitive: protective of the people, places, and things that are uniquely Dallas. Emphasizing chain concepts or out-of-state invaders doesn’t take away from the great work Dallas restaurants are doing, it raises the stakes for everyone in the same way a multinational entity such as Michelin does. Because yeah, I wish Dallas-based chains like White Rock Coffee, Toasted, or La La Land took some pages out of Foxtrot’s book and improved their seating, their coffee, their vibe, or all of the above.
Let’s broaden the conversation, and make room for these out-of-state concepts that make us better, by showing us how to do things differently.
My final stone to throw: if you’re a coffee shop and you don’t have lavender syrup on your menu, I hate you.
Brooklyn in Dallas 