Café la Reine opens second spot in Manchester’s North End
Nearly a decade after Saint Anselm College alum Alex Horton opened Café la Reine on Elm Street in Manchester, she and her team have expanded to a second location built on quality eats, great coffee and community. Café la Reine – North End, which arrived in the space of the former Blake’s Restaurant last month, is more than three times the size of its downtown counterpart, introducing a full-service breakfast and lunch dining experience in addition to craft cocktails.
It was March 2013 when Horton, a Methuen, Mass., native who has lived in the Queen City since her college days, opened the original Café la Reine. At the time, there were not a lot of places around like it, and Horton herself recalls as a student always looking for a place where she could order a cup of coffee and comfortably sit down and do her homework.
Over the years, the spot has added everything from sandwiches and salads to avocado toasts, oatmeal bowls and açaí bowls to its menu, and has become known for its live “Java Jams.”
Even pre-pandemic, Horton said she had been looking for a potential second location. She happens to also live in the North End neighborhood where Blake’s closed its Hooksett Road restaurant in early January 2021, a spot that had been open for nearly four decades.
“When Blake’s closed, I knew that it was going to be kind of a loss for our neighborhood,” she said. “I mean, my husband and I went here on the weekends for breakfast forever, or we’d walk the dogs down [here] and get ice cream from the window. We frequented this place a lot.”
Soon after the property went on the market, Horton — along with her general manager, Dominique Gibson — decided to inquire about potentially taking it over.
“I really wanted a second location that had parking, and I wanted to expand on my menu, because you can only offer so much in a 1,000-square-foot space downtown. It’s so small and our kitchen is so tiny,” Horton said. “And so, I wanted a spot that had a bigger kitchen so that we could possibly make things for both locations out of this kitchen here.”
A few aesthetics, such as the tables and the blue-colored booths, have been kept and may be familiar to those who frequented Blake’s. But Horton and her team still spent the last several months revamping the space, even recruiting Alexis Clark and Nicole Rocha of The Terracotta Room on Elm Street to help install the plants you see along most of the booths.
As you walk inside, you can immediately turn to your right and order coffee or food to go from a counter, or you can be seated at a booth or table. Horton said her team plans to utilize the takeout window for online orders.
With the exception of the açaí and oatmeal bowls, just about everything on the menu downtown is available at Café la Reine – North End. But that’s not to say that the new eatery’s menu is a carbon copy of its predecessor. A wide variety of items are exclusively available at this space, from pancakes and Belgian waffles to eggs Benedicts and hash brown bowls.
“We have a bunch of starters, like loaded fries with eggs and hollandaise on top, which is so good,” Horton said. “We have wings, boneless [and] bone-in, and then we have huge breakfast sandwiches … and your classic big breakfast where you get everything. … For lunch, we have tuna melts, avocado BLTs and then some burgers and salads, so it’s a pretty full menu here.”
Café la Reine – North End also differs from the downtown location in that there is a full bar, from which you can order mimosas, bloody marys, and what Horton calls Above Average Joes.
“They are our boozy coffee cocktails that we serve in a pint glass. They’re so good,” she said.
Horton said she soon hopes to host either open mic or weekend live music events at her new space. A side room directly to the left of where you walk in has also already been used for larger parties and gatherings, or for those who want to go and work where it’s a little bit quieter.
Reflecting on the last decade, Horton said she never thought she would eventually expand to this degree, but has nonetheless enjoyed the experience and the response from the community.
“I was so young when I opened downtown, and I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll be OK with this,’” she said. “But then, I guess it’s just been the excitement and adventure of opening new businesses, especially with people that you love to work with. I feel like it’s all of our projects because we all had a hand in it, and that kind of reflects in everything from the menu to the way it’s decorated.”
Café la Reine – North End
Where: 53 Hooksett Road, Unit 6, Manchester
Hours: Thursday through Tuesday, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Closed on Wednesdays.
More info: Visit toasttab.com/cafelareinenorthend, find them on Facebook and Instagram @cafelareine.northend or call 782-5367
Featured photo: Photo by Ethos & Able Creative, eacreative.co.
