Back at It

In normal times, Rice Coffeehouse is packed with students doing homework and chatting with friends, while a long line of undergraduates, graduates, faculty and staff wait eagerly for bagels, frappies, $1 drip coffee and the much-beloved “Nutty Bee.” All that changed in March 2020, however, when COVID-19 forced Rice to shut down most in-person campus activities — and Coffeehouse with it. A year later, Coffeehouse is back up and running, but its operations have undergone unprecedented changes that reflect the realities of life in the pandemic. 

Coffeehouse first opened in the Rice Memorial Center courtyard in 1990, and its initial offerings consisted of black coffee, espresso and Oreos (all characterized by the Thresher as “tolerable”). In the 30 years since, the student-run coffee shop has become a Rice institution and staple of campus life. With its more than 45 employees serving over 200,000 drinks a year, Coffeehouse is Rice’s oldest and largest student-run business (SRB), a category that also includes The Hoot, a late-night food service, and Rice Bikes, a bicycle repair shop. 

While Coffeehouse was shuttered for the remainder of the spring semester as well as summer 2020, students worked to plan a safe reopening. “We had Zoom meetings over the summer where we were wondering how to make this work,” explained Marcus Tierrablanca ’21, who was the health and maintenance manager at the time. “It was a time when no restaurants had COVID-19 safety measures, so we started from scratch. It was a huge team effort.”

All the SRB management teams were required to design a plan for their businesses that complied with Rice Crisis Management requirements for on-campus, in-person operations, as well as county health department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for operating during the pandemic. Coffeehouse decided to transition to a “grab-and-go” model with online ordering. The café space was closed off to allow social distancing among employees, and careful measures were implemented to minimize contact between employees and customers.

“It’s been a learning curve for sure,” said Miguel Luna ’22, Coffeehouse’s current general manager. “But it’s been great to see more and more people coming back to Coffeehouse as they return to campus.” Luna added that plans are being developed to keep the business open during the summer and perhaps partially reopen their café space in the fall. “There’s so much work that each KOC [keeper of coffee] is putting into each shift, but we all want to create a community as much as possible,” said Brendan Wong ’21, the general manager in 2020. “Not just for the employees, but for Rice as a whole, because we know how much community is needed these days.” — Mariana Nájera '21