Omi’s, a new West End coffee shop, opens this morning at 7am.
Omi’s is located on Brackett Street right across from Outliers Eatery. Co-owners Naomi Hall and Katie Bruzgo are sourcing their coffee from Maine roaster Seacoast Coffee.
You can get a sense of shop’s interior by looking at photos on their Facebook page.
Now look, I wish every single restaurant that opens the best of luck. It is a huge investment of time and money for these owners. That said, I specifically said that Compass Rose would not make it a year. Forget about a year, it is already closed. I think people on here said hey give them a chance, why be so negative?
It’s because the Portland dining scene is so easy to see if you’ve spent any time here at all. If you want a successful restaurant in Portland you only have a few options. Most important is that you better already have another popular eatery established in the city. Not in Bar Harbor, not in some other town, but here.
You better not go into a cursed location. That spot is just a bad spot.
If you aren’t established you better be an ethnic eatery like Paciarino, Zapoteca, Emilista, El Corazon, schulte and Herr, etc.
There are exceptions to this rule but if you are a start up in Portland with just a regular higher end American style restaurant, you’re probably not going to make it very long. You either have to have something to draw in the hipsters or the business crowd and if you can’t do that it’s over. You can’t open Peter’s Grill and Seafood House if nobody knows who Peter is.
It’s sad because they could have done everything right at Compass, the food could have been great. It wouldn’t have mattered. DOA in this very strange foodieville we call Portland.
What does this have to do with omi’s coffee shop?
Haha, I totally agree with Nick — and the relevance is that OMI’s is located in a “dining dead zone” of Portland. I was just telling my friend here that we live so close to Outliers (never been) and now Omi’s (never been) and are never likely to go to either because no one walks in that direction for dinner & drinks. It’s just out-of-the-way, even for regular city walkers such as ourselves. I even hesitate swinging down to El Rayo, and with so many other choices uptown (ie. Taco Escobarr, Zapoteca), even that is borderline “far.”