Four months into its Elizabeth Street location, Mikey G's is among the first food and drink businesses to open since the business corridors inside Magnolia Center started going by Midtown.
Mikey G's is not the first business to find success in Magnolia Center. The area has been a vibrant hub of business in Riverside for over half a century. The Sire has endured on Magnolia Avenue for decades, and Condron Coffee and The Outpost are among the wave of successes on Sunnyside Drive. What Mikey G's represents is a continuation, not a beginning.
Still, the shop is open and thriving. It opened this spring and has become a go-to for people looking for an excellent product without downtown parking hassles.
"This location has really exceeded our expectations," said Jake Driscoll, an owner. "The flow of traffic that has come through, the people who are excited, not only about the drinks, but about the bagels."
Driscoll said the Midtown name struck him as a good look for what is happening in Riverside. It is already one of the places people use to explain where Midtown is.
That it sits a few blocks from Condron does not seem to trouble him, and neither do the ones opening downtown. A new coffee shop in Riverside has stopped being news and become something closer to a running joke.
"There's always going to be more coffee shops that open up, and if that's a reality, we see that as a good thing," Driscoll said. "More coffee in Riverside helps coffee in Riverside as a whole. We're always going to be Mikey G's."
Some of the traffic is not there for coffee at all. Mikey G's acquired Parzel's Bagelry, the bakery it once shared a kitchen with at Harvest Christian Fellowship on Arlington, from founder Kali Hathaway, and the bagels have built a following of their own.
The bagels that built their own following - Driscoll says some customers come in for these alone, then discover the drinks. (David Fouts)
"We owe a lot to Kali," Driscoll said. "She was down to hand off her dream of bagels to us."
"We wanted to have a food option, but it seems like we have even a customer base who will come in just to grab a bagel, which is amazing," Driscoll said. "So we have to let them know that we also have delicious drinks as well."
They do. The espresso tonics and matcha on tap are worth the trip on a hot afternoon.
The original location at Harvest still opens Sundays from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., though the bulk of the business now runs out of Elizabeth Street.
What the corridor has is a handful of businesses that opened at different times, for different reasons, and ended up serving the same few blocks. The older ones kept it going through years before the Midtown designation. The newest are opening into a neighborhood that has just been handed a name.
"We just get the benefit off of the energy, the momentum that's happening in this side of town," Driscoll said.
Driscoll would not say whether more locations are coming.
"At the end of the day, we're dreamers," he said. "We're always open to other opportunities, but at this very moment, we're very grateful to be in Midtown."
More information: Mikey G's is located at 3780 Elizabeth St. and is open 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. The original location, 6115 Arlington Ave., is open Sundays from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Follow the shop on Instagram at @bigmikeygs.
