BY TIM VETTER | PHOTOS BY HELEN HO
A GOOD CAFE IS LIKE A WELL-WORN SWEATER: It’s familiar and comforting and it feels like home. Something gets lost in the corporate franchise chain coffee shops, where the communal space feels more like the waiting room at a doctor’s office. Even more is lost in the fast-food style of drive-up window ordering, where people and coffee move as if on a conveyor belt. Fortunately for downtown Stroudsburg, Cafe Duet understands the need for a true community cafe.
Cafe Duet is the labor of love of the couple Dan Bickart and Maria “Betsi” Bickart. Dan cut his teeth in the food industry while working at cafes during his studies at Temple University. He later worked service industry jobs in New York City, eventually managing a Turkish eatery named Lokal near Brooklyn’s McCarren Park. Betsi grew up in Buenos Aires. Her Argentine background has influenced certain flavors and dishes at Cafe Duet, like her cheesy and aromatic hand-stuffed Argentine empanadas.
Dan’s family hails from Delaware Water Gap. He fondly remembers the region of his childhood—the open space to roam—but even as a young person he recognized the need for community spaces. All of the breathtaking nature was there. The missing element was a place for people to connect.
Dan likens Cafe Duet to what sociologists call a “third place,” a public location separate from the home or workplace that provides a casual, neutral setting essential for a healthy, thriving neighborhood.
“From the beginning, the whole idea was to make a gathering spot where the consumption is secondary,” Dan says. Cafes have long been vital gathering places for communities worldwide, at times even taking on political, social, and artistic importance. The revolutionary ideas and subversive chatter that once blossomed from European and Ottoman cafes caused absolutist leaders to ban both coffee drinking and cafes. Ernest Hemingway frequented Parisian cafes where he often wrote, drawing inspiration from the caffeine-fueled environment.
When Dan and Betsi opened in 2013, they operated as a staff of two. The duo made coffee behind the bar, baked banana breads, and simmered scratch-made soup. There was an immediate community response. It wasn’t uncommon to run out of ingredients and have to switch up menu items. Cafe Duet became a place for families to eat after church, for clients to meet with lawyers before a session at the courthouse across the street, and for remote workers to gather in front of their laptops. The cafe became busier over time and expanded to its current incarnation with front patio seating in the warmer months, multiple interior dining spaces, and an ivy-covered garden area out back.
It’s a casual, cozy setting, with a dining space overlooking the street. The space is hit with warm light in the morning. A second dining space looks out over the back garden dining area. The mostly wood interior has cleverly repurposed antiques, including a church pew that became a table’s bench and a barn door that separates the third interior dining space.
A turntable spins vinyl records from a collection that includes everything from the Smiths to the Staple Singers. Dan played in a band that toured the country, living out of a van that traversed the flat expanse of the American Midwest. He was always cooking for the “little group of malnourished guys on the road.” This further strengthened his idea about the power of feeding others and the importance of community.
The community remained as Cafe Duet grew and changed. Dan and Betsi began catering events. For a while, the cafe hosted Tapas Night, but later stopped doing so to ensure everyone working at Cafe Duet had evenings off from work. The two employees became five. A wall came down to offer more space. Seats remained full through these years of growth.
COMMUNITY SUPPORT DURING COVID
Perhaps the most pronounced support from the community came during the Covid lockdowns. The Bickarts made a pickup window by cutting out a section of the bar, where they could hand meals to people lining up on the street. They sold six packs of frozen empanadas. Locals bought gift cards to keep the business above water. “There was no drop in patronage,” Dan says. “Everyone was on the same page around here, supporting the places they are happy to have exist.”
The front door of Cafe Duet’s red-brick storybook facade opens directly into the Monroe Farmers Market, which meets every Saturday from May through October in Stroudsburg’s Courthouse Square. The market, the cafe, and the community have a symbiotic relationship. Cafe Duet fills its pantry with ingredients sold by vendors. Locals perusing the market can pick up food at Cafe Duet’s window, or grab a seat to slow down and enjoy breakfast amongst their neighbors. Betsi sells her homemade empanadas at the market. Cafe Duet operates a cart for freshly brewed coffee from Dan’s Santa Mama Coffee Company, which has been roasting its coffee beans locally in Delaware Water Gap since 2017.
Of course, the access to fresh, local ingredients from the producer-only farmers market is a bonus for Cafe Duet and its customers. “Our farmers market is incredible. We get cases of peaches, stone fruits, cherries. We have our apple people—oh, my god, their apples are so good.” Dan’s passion for his work seeps from every word that he says.
He focuses on ingredients that are in season. In summer, that’s tomatoes, so they get sliced into a Caprese salad. Blueberries aren’t in season? Then the blueberry crumble becomes an apple crumble. The customer favorite brown bread Cafe Duet uses comes from Daily Bread Bake Shop. The sweet corn used in Betsi’s empanadas comes from Menegus Farm. The mushrooms come from Four Fields Farms. Eggs are needed in such high volume that they are sourced from multiple local farms, including a weekly case from Four Fields Farms. “Who really wants to go to Restaurant Depot?” Dan asks.
Dan understands that the entire life cycle of a dish from growing the food to consumption is important, and there is an ethical choice to be made by buying local. But at the same time, the choice to purchase local, in-season ingredients from family-run operations that they know and care about also provides customers with the best-tasting food, and for some, that’s their bottom line.
‘NOT COMPLICATED, JUST DELICIOUS’
At Cafe Duet, we’re talking about relatively simple, good food, with fresh, quality ingredients. The cafe closes at 3pm each day, so the focus here is on breakfast and lunch. Food is ordered at a counter before guests seat themselves. They specialize in gooey, cheesy, unctuous breakfast sandwiches like the Melted Brie or the Roasted Mushroom and Smoked Gruyere. There’s a salty, cheesy baked eggs En Cocotte dish with shaved aged cheese and scratch-made marinara, that while French in origin is also much like a shakshuka breakfast you might have in the medina in Tangier.
For the sweetness inclined, the menu offers a “Cafe Duet” Belgian waffle that comes dressed with sliced banana, almonds, vanilla Greek yogurt, honey drizzle and granola. It’s a decadent, creamy creation a kid might make if given free rein in the kitchen. It can be hard to excite a curmudgeonly food writer with avocado toast, but the Pink Avo Toast has layers of flavors and textures with beet-pickled egg slices, baby arugula, sweet pickled onions, sea salt, all cut through with an acidic squeeze of lemon that makes the whole thing pop. It’s not complicated; it’s just delicious.
“A lot of our food is assembled like that,” says Dan. “It’s not like you need to go to the CIA [Culinary Institute of America] to know how to make a bechamel or something. It’s not like we are preparing these elaborate French recipes. We are doing assembly. We’re doing broccoli rabe with fresh mozzarella: You put it on a fresh piece of good bread. That’s food.”
What Dan and Betsi are doing is working. Tables fill up quickly on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The coffee flows, and the variety of delicious homemade pastries that first greet customers move quickly out of the case and onto their plates. Customers who travel from other towns in the Poconos and from more distant destinations might be left wondering if Cafe Duet might expand to their neck of the woods.
“We could never do another one,” Dan says. “It has grown to the level that our community could support in a healthy way. Any more growth, and it would go downhill. It would not be as genuine. It would no longer be a community spot.” It’s a refreshing mindset, the focus on quality over quantity and the understanding that it might be best to let a good thing be.
So pull up to a table at Cafe Duet. Talk to someone at a neighboring table, plan an adventure, write a poem, crunch some work deliverables, pitch to a client, read a book, fall in love, or simply come for the coffee and food, because that’s more than enough of a reason.
Cafe Duet
35 N. 7th St., Stroudsburg, PA
570-431-3442
cafeduetpa.com
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