New Premier Café Wants To Change The Way You Think About Coffee
Dr. Mariaclara Bago and Dr. Vincent Apicella have added another extension to their Premier Family Health facility in the Wellington Reserve complex on State Road 7. The married doctors want community members to slow down their daily routines for enough time to sit inside the new Premier Café to experience a cup of its specialty coffee.
The doctors believe the new venture neatly pairs with all the health services that Premier Family Health has provided for more than a decade.
“I don’t want to understate our coffee, because it’s important to know that we have the finest coffee bean around. We’re partnered with Panther Coffee. They’re one of the highest-ranked roasters in the entire country,” Apicella said. “They’re down in Miami, and they’re the best at what they do, and we like to partner with the best.”
Apicella said the most important aspect of the café isn’t so much regarding what he and Bago are introducing, but their reason why.
“It’s about your experience in this place,” he said. “You have to drive outside the boundaries of Wellington to find a specialty coffee house with this type of an experience. We built this for the community. We built this for everyone to enjoy.”
Bago said that Premier Café is focused on what goes into every mug and on every plate.
“Everybody loves a good cup of coffee. In today’s day and age, the vision of having coffee while reading a newspaper and spending time with loved ones has long been replaced with the ‘world runs on coffee’ adage,” Bago said. “Easily enough, we find it very difficult to find a good cup of coffee that is outside of the massively overproduced, processed version of [major chains and franchises]. They are great business models, but it’s not the coffee that comes first.”
The shop is offering classic coffee drinks using the Panther Coffee bean to provide the experience. There is a nitro cold brew that is featured at the shop providing a fresh take on a coffee beverage that has become popular. From croissants to paninis and salads, the café aesthetic is all there, but special care has been taken in the ingredients used in these products.
“We built it for the experience of what healthy coffee and what healthy eating is about,” Bago explained.
The café itself was inspired by the doctors’ personal experiences in Europe, particularly Spain.
“On any given day during our stay, we would meet up with friends and family over coffee, reminisce over good times and the beautiful mountain views,” Bago said. “It is this feeling of peace and relaxation that Dr. Apicella and I brought into our relationship six years ago, when we made it a point to enjoy at least 16 minutes of peace and quiet, coffee time, amidst our daily schedule of kids, patients and business.”
The café is also something that will serve as an educational tool at Premier Family Health.
“Some of the roles that I’m going to be playing are with regard to being able to provide educational forums, from which we can provide cooking classes and a lecture series on what it is to select healthy food options,” Bago said, explaining some of the differences between over-processed coffee and organic fair trade coffee.
The newly added staff who will provide service at the café will offer the same quality service that can be found at other areas of the business.
“We built a very experienced team, and to us, it’s no different than all the team members at Premier,” Apicella said. “They understand that their role is to not just serve someone coffee. No one here just has a defined role and job task. Their role is to make sure that you have a better sense of well-being from the time that you walked in, to the time that you leave.”
Apicella and Bago entered the coffee business viewing it as a community project to offer something different. “It’s really in alignment with every other project I’ve done,” Apicella said. “It’s there to serve the community. It’s there to provide an extraordinary sense of well-being, and it’s there to create jobs and support small business.”
The café is a tool that the doctors want to use to support the local community, local businesses and to offer something that you will not find at another café. “That’s why this place is here. It’s a little bit of a refuge for people to get away from stress,” Apicella said. “We have to-go cups, but we don’t want people to use them. I want people to come here and take 10 minutes out of your day. Let the rest of the world stop, enjoy the best cup of specialty coffee around and just relax.”
Premier Café is located at 1037 State Road 7, Suite 118, in Wellington. For more information, call (561) 657-8019 or visit www.cafeatpremier.com.
