One of the city’s favorite lunch cafés has joined forces with a relatively new dinner spot (same owners) in order to provide customers with the best of all worlds. After years of expanding spaces and offerings, and finally venturing into an offshoot dinner business, Café 59/Madonna’s are essentially one business. That means that you can still get all of the great lunch offerings that the café became known for over the years. At the same time the dinner component (what was Madonna’s) will have the ability to piggyback off of the devoted café clientele.
Café 59 Food and Spirits is the combination of both the lunch and the dinner concepts. Which is probably a good thing considering that the two offered a number of dishes that vied for customers – which might have been difficult to manage considering they were across the street from each other with shared owners. Simply speaking, the recipe for success was an integration of food, workers, owners and spaces.
I spoke to one customer today who told me that she especially liked the new combo because she could get her favorite lunch items along with a glass of wine (or a cocktail). She pointed out the the two restaurants had the exact same seating capacity and that there was now a flat screen TV for catching up on sports and news. “It’s a no-brainer if you ask me,” she said.
“Café 59 was in the original 59 Allen Street location for 14 years,” Co-owner Chris Connolly told me. “That’s a long time if you think about it. The new location gives us the ability to offer hot and cold foods at the same time. In the original location we didn’t even have a fryer or a grill – so we couldn’t cook a hamburger if we wanted to. Now we’ve married the two menus and increased our offerings so that all of our customers are happy.”
To see the combined menu, click here. Also see Facebook.
Café 59 Food and Spirits | 62 Allen Street | Buffalo NY | (716) 883-1880
Monday-Thursday | 8:00am to 10:00pm
Friday | 8:00am to Midnight
Saturday | 10:00am to Midnight
Sunday | Noon to 10:00pm