Staff Blog
What happened to Hausbrandt?
posted by Drew Lazor
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You might’ve noticed that the storefront of Caffé Hausbrandt (207 S. 15th St.) has been dark for weeks. Carrie Lapp, who purchased the café in 2004 with Trieste-born husband Massimo Taurisano and partners Max and Nicoletta Tuccone (at that point, it’d been open for a year already under different management), says shuttering was a business decision, and that the building will be coming down, so the fate was inevitable. The café was the retail face of Hausbrandt USA, which held exclusive import/distribution rights to all of the Italian roaster’s products in the United States.
Though the flagship is gone, they’re still plugging along with six locations of Academia del Caffe — 1 S. Penn Square, 1616 Walnut, in the Design Center at 2400 Market, in the Public Ledger Building at 620 Chestnut and in the Curtis Center at 601 Walnut — the espresso bar brand the couple first introduced to Philly in 2006. One important distinction: All the Academias are now serving Miscela d’Oro, a coffee brand from Sicily, instead of Hausbrandt.
For more on Philly’s caffeine cognosceti, see my Nov. 2007 story on Saxbys Coffee.
But what is going to replace the building? I guess that means nothing is going into the old Pasion spot.
a new mixed use 5-6 story infill building with lots of retail/restaurant space
i walk by everyday and it makes me really sad the cafe is gone .. i loved that place .
Actually what happened was that the owners was looking to go bankrupt, and trying to get rid of all his assets. He owes a lot of money to investors, and vendors, and couldn’t even pay his employees, or the previous owners. They actually put the cafe up for sale. Hausbrandt also wasnt going to sell him anymore coffee because he owed them over 200K.