Ashley Rodriguez
Man making an espresso.
Jared Kist at work at Broken Board.
One of the first things you see when approaching Broken Board Coffee is a sign declaring, "I assure you there's a coffee shop in here."
In a strip mall near East Towne Mall, Broken Board is doubly hard to find because it’s inside Focus Boardshop, a skateboard shop. Despite its unexpected location, Broken Board is a hub of specialty coffee, serving well-executed drinks made with beans from some of the nation’s best roasters.
Jared Kist opened Broken Board in 2021 at the suggestion of his friend John Dobbe, longtime owner of Focus. "John approached me to see if I wanted to run a coffee shop here because he had wanted to do something like that for years — but he didn't have any experience,” says Kist, noting that bicycle shops and coffee bars often coexist with one another, but there aren’t as many examples of skate shops and cafes sharing space. “It was the middle of the pandemic, and I didn't have a job, and he was like,' I think you would be good at this.'"
The location led to some confusing encounters. "In the first year, I'd see people come up to the door, look around, and then turn back,” says Kist. “That's why I put the sign up."
Before the pandemic, Kist worked in marketing and design for Food Fight Restaurant Group. He did all the design work for Broken Board, including the sign insisting there's a coffee shop inside. He's also worked in the restaurant industry but not in coffee, so he dove in head first, brewing pour-overs at home to develop his palate. "I would get samples from different roasters, and I learned to dial in and taste," he says.
"I've worked in bars and made cocktails, and I'm an avid cook, so I know how to taste things, but learning to taste coffee outside of, 'This is good, this isn't good,' was new for me."
He also turned to books and YouTube to learn as much as possible, and credits books like What I Know About Running Coffee Shops by Colin Harmon, founder of the specialty coffee roastery 3fe in Ireland, for developing the identity of Broken Board.
Kist's menu is simple and focused, designed to highlight the quality beans he sources from nationally recognized roasters. Wisconsin roaster Wonderstate anchors his menu.
For the others, he rotates roasters every few months — recently, he’s had coffees from Proud Mary, originally an Australian roastery that’s expanded to Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, within the last few years, and Idle Hands, a micro-roastery based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Recently the shop featured a coffee roasted by Idle Hands with beans from Guatemala that was recognized in the 2022 Cup of Excellence competition, an annual contest that recognizes the country's best coffees.
Patrons can order from a selection of pour-over options. There are also typical coffee drinks like lattes and cappuccinos.
There’s also a rotating selection of signature drinks, including the somewhat unusual espresso lemonade. For that drink, Kist makes a lemon cordial base and adds espresso and lemon bitters to make a drink that accentuates the brightness of the espresso, anchored by the coffee’s slight bitterness. Think of it as a punched-up version of an Arnold Palmer.
The espresso lemonade shows up on Broken Board’s menu every summer, but patrons inquire about the drink, served iced, year-round. "The lemonade was one of my earliest ideas," he says. "I brought it back at the end of May, and we've sold 90% as many espresso lemonades as we have all our lattes — if we sold 400 lattes, we sold around 360 espresso lemonades. And that includes all lattes, hot or iced."
Broken Board also features pastries from all-vegan Heirloom Bakery & Kitchen and Level 5 Donuts. The doughnuts, which have “sort of a cult following,” says Kist, helped drive foot traffic into the shop during its early days.
By now, Kist knows many of the people who come in: "I feel like I know at least 50% of the customers," he says. "I know there are one-timers because we're by the highway, but even some of those travelers I know because they come back every time they're traveling between Chicago and Minneapolis. They probably don't expect to find someone like us off the highway, so when they do, they always stop here."
