Coffee News

Game-changing new coffee shop to break new ground in north Fort Worth

Good Company Coffee will break new ground.

Amor Ciego

There’s a new coffee shop coming to Keller/far north Fort Worth, and the owner hopes you’ll stick around long enough to finish a second cup.

Called Good Company Coffee, it’s the brainchild of Robin Dunivan, a local businesswoman, and her husband, Grant. After successful careers in banking and insurance, they decided to build the coffee shop of their dreams.

“We wanted to do something in our community and for our community,” she says. “Our goal is to create a place for people to connect and just be together.”

It'll be located in a new, one-story building at 5729 Golden Triangle Blvd. - one of five business storefronts in a strip center anchored by an outdoor patio, where Dunivan hopes to eventually host live music.

But she'll start out slow, with coffee and pastries.

“We have a lot of potential for it to grow but we are just going to start simple and see where it takes us,” she says.

She’s currently building out the full team, which includes a top-secret, world-class coffee consultant. "I’m not ready to share the name just yet," she says.

But she does disclose some game-changing details designed to make Good more personable than the run-of-the-mill coffee house. For one thing, they'll be using a Modbar-style setup, vs. the traditional espresso machine.

Modbar is the sibling to famed coffee equipment manufacturer La Marzocco, in which the espresso machine is built under the bar, with only a beer tap-type spout for the coffee breaking the hip-height countertop.

"It's not this big, clunky machine on the counter,” she says. "When a customer comes up to the counter, you can actually see each other.”

The style has been embraced by forward-thinking shops such as La Reunion Coffee in Bishop Arts and the new Starbucks that just opened at 1924 Abrams Pkwy. in Lakewood.

They're also instituting an even more radical policy: To help foster the spirit of community, Good Company Coffee will not have a drive-through, bucking a terrible drive-thru-centric trend that's recently emerged in the coffee world.

But it will be “digital forward,” with QR codes on tables for easy, contact-less ordering options.

“We want to be a destination place,” Dunivan says.

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Chef News

Fort Worth's Will Rogers Memorial Center welcomes bright new chef

FortWorthtx.gov

Will Rogers Memorial Center

There's a new chef in town: Waylon Cornelius, named executive chef of catering and concessions for Craft Culinary Concepts, the food and beverage provider at Will Rogers Memorial Center.

Will Rogers Memorial Center is the 120-acre entertainment complex anchoring Fort Worth’s Cultural District, owned and operated by the City of Fort Worth. Cornelius will oversee menus for trade shows and other events at the center which bring in more than 2 million visitors a year.

Craft Culinary Concepts is headquartered in Glendale, Arizona, and manages food and beverage programs for entertainment, sports and cultural facilities.

Chef Waylon Corneliusfortworthtx.gov

According to a release, Cornelius joined the team this summer and is already shifting the expectations of guests from a typical “BBQ and beans” menu to a bill of fare satisfying every kind of palate.

“We always have fajitas ready to go, but we also make a beautiful Beef Wellington or baked salmon with a pink salt crust,” Cornelius says in a statement.

For consumer trade shows, Craft and its partners Caribou and Taco Heads offer more choices for the thousands of guests who attend events at WRMC annually.

“Some of our equestrian guests are away from home and here for several days, and they need more than popcorn and hot dogs,” Cornelius says. “Our concessions offer biscuits and gravy, burritos made in-house, strawberry salad, fruit and yogurt cups.”

A native of Mansfield, Cornelius grew up helping in a farm-to-table kitchen. He was raised on a farm with his mother, grandmother, and grandfather -- a Vietnam veteran who enjoyed vegetable gardens and raising hogs and chickens. He studied computer science after high school and holds an associate's degree in Cultural Resource Management and Policy Analysis from Tarrant County College.

He's a 2003 graduate of AIMS Academy of Culinary Arts in Dallas where he was mentored by a number of great chefs. While training as assistant executive sous chef at the AAA four-diamond Grand Hyatt DFW, he worked with Executive Chef Sutti Sripolpa, chef Eric Dreyer (who went on to be Oprah Winfrey’s personal chef), and Chef Jean-Claude Plihon, under whom he honed his French cooking skills.

As executive sous chef at the opening of Perry’s Steakhouse and Grille in Southlake, Cornelius gained expertise with volume. While at HG Sply Co., he learned about gluten-free items and other food allergies.

HG Sply is also where he crossed paths with Chef James R. Schell III, Craft’s general manager at WRMC, who recruited Cornelius to the complex.

"James said he needed someone who can hit moving targets, push the culinary team to be more avant-garde and use locally sourced, seasonal ingredients, so here I am," Cornelius says. "Culinary is a small world."

“I want people to say, ‘When we were in Fort Worth, you won’t believe what we got at Will Rogers!’” Schell says. “Even the celebrities who perform [in the auditorium] are surprised. When Chicago played here recently and we served dinner backstage, they said they felt treated like the Rolling Stones.”

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