SOUTHBURY — For Klajdi Cepa, there’s a difference between serving “a cup of coffee that’s just caffeine to get you through the day versus a cup of coffee that’s made with love.”
“People come into a coffee shop with a million different things,” said Cepa, who co-owns the craft coffee shop Bruno’s Café, in Farmington's Unionville section, with his fiancée Zoe Doherty. “Some have had a rough day, some of them have had a great day, and they come in the morning, and they want a pick-me-up … If we personally wouldn’t be eating or drinking that food, we wouldn’t serve that to customers. We want to treat our customers the way we’d want to be treated.”
Watertown residents Cepa and Doherty opened the original Bruno’s Café at 55 Mill St. in October 2023. Describing themselves as “very food conscious,” Doherty said they pride themselves in the quality of the ingredients used in their coffee and baked goods and in educating their customers on what they’re being served.
Doherty said they source their beans from the North Carolina-based coffee roaster Counter Culture Coffee, which she said hosts all of their cafe's baristas for training at the roaster's different facilities "to make sure they're on par with the modern day brewing methods." She said the cafe also gets its dairy products from Arethusa Farm, its pastries from G Café Bakery in New Haven and its bagels from Ami's Crispy Bagels & Deli in Waterbury.
The couple also runs a mobile coffee shop out of a 1965 fully restored Airstream they've dubbed Bruno's Café on Wheels. Cepa said they use Bruno's Café on Wheels for private events.
After nearly three years of running their Unionville café, Cepa and Doherty anticipate opening a second brick and mortar location for Bruno’s Café at 800 Main St. South in Southbury this winter.
While they don’t yet have a set date for the new location’s opening, Doherty said they plan to run the Unionville and Southbury locations and Bruno's Café on Wheels at the same time. Out of the total 10 team members that work at the original café, Cepa said two team members will be heading to the Southbury café and they expect to have 12 to 15 total staff members.
Cepa said the size of their current café played a big role in their decision to expand to Southbury. The Unionville café is around 1,000 square feet in size and seats between 15 and 20 people, while the new Southbury location is around 2,000 square feet and seats about 50 people.
Apart from the new shop’s larger size, Cepa said he wants to “copy and paste” the Bruno’s Café experience at their new shop to create “the same experience that you would (have) in Unionville.”
Doherty said the idea of launching Bruno’s Café started during the pandemic when she and Cepa were studying at the University of New Haven.
“Restaurants were closing down their seating, so once the restrictions lifted, we said, ‘Let’s get out there, let’s get a coffee,’ ” she said. “So we’d travel all the way around Connecticut to coffee shops because we’re avid coffee drinkers. That’s where we sparked the inspiration to do something like that later on.”
Prior to opening Bruno’s Café, Cepa said, he had been working at his family’s former restaurant Epicure in Thomaston. Doherty said they worked at Epicure together, with Cepa managing the restaurant and Doherty working as a waitress.
While he didn’t want to go into the “full restaurant industry,” Cepa said he believed they could deliver a “high quality product” with “a small ingredient list.”
The couple, who met their first day of college, graduated from the University of New Haven in 2023 and later opened Bruno’s Café, named after their mini goldendoodle. Cepa said they started the build-out for Bruno's Café on Wheels in May 2024 and booked their first event at the end of July 2024.
During their first few years of business, Cepa admitted that it was “really tough trying to differentiate the people who want a quick cup of coffee versus the people that care about what they’re putting in their bodies.”
However, Doherty said their customers have been receptive to their “spiel” about their café’s ingredients and products.
“We’ve always been very conscious about what we consume, so our whole goal is to serve the community with high quality ingredients and stuff we can be proud to serve people,” Doherty said.
Kaitlin Keane is thrilled to nurture her journalism career as a weeklies reporter with Hearst and looks forward to becoming better acquainted with the communities in her coverage area. While she enjoys the opportunity to cover breaking news, her beat is generally focused on local profiles and school-centered stories. Outside of her reporting work, she is an avid reader, baker and cyclist.
860-533-9343
Service Areas
