By Tim Moran
Seating capacity inside Beverly’s Two Mile Coffee Bar has more than doubled as more food options have been added to their menu, giving coffee lovers in the neighborhood twice the reason to hit up the popular neighborhood hotspot a mere steps away from the 99th Street Metra station.
“The shop that had been open just to the south of us had moved out and we had this opportunity to potentially expand, so we pulled the trigger,” said Nathaniel Hollister, owner of Two Mile Coffee Bar. The coffee shop moved four blocks south from 95th Street three years ago.
Included in Two Mile’s expansion is a fully renovated space just south of their original footprint at 9907 South Walden Parkway.
“We added a door between the two spaces, rebuilt our partition and have a big archway connecting the two spaces,” Hollister said.
It’s a contrasting design philosophy between the original space and the newly added one, Hollister explained.
“The walls are dark, the chairs are dark (in the original space), and in the new space everything is bright. The chairs are all white,” he said. “This creates two similar spaces, but flips it, giving our customers two very different and unique seating spaces to choose from.”
The new design also allows Two Mile to serve many more people at once. “It also works as a standalone space that can be rented out for showers and other events,” Hollister said.
The changes at Two Mile aren’t limited to the design, however. The coffee bar has also recently added a daily breakfast menu, with lunch options set to come sometime in November.
Uvaldo Leon, the kitchen manager at Two Mile, said many of their regular guests were so excited to try everything on the new menu that “everything would sell out really quickly.”
“So we immediately increased the item counts on our menu,” Leon said. The two most popular new menu items are the chorizo and egg breakfast taco and the bacon and egg croissant sandwich.
“We make everything fresh,” Leon said. “The croissants, the tortillas, they’re all made that morning. It makes for a different experience.”
Expect BLTs and turkey sandwiches to be the most sought-after lunch items when the menu expands again.
“People have been excited about it,” Hollister said. “And we’re happy to be able to provide this space for our neighbors.”
