Why go
The counter as a hospitality station
Andrea Allen checks the counter as Co-Founder & Director of Hospitality & Management at Onyx Coffee Lab - Springdale in Springdale. The gesture fits the work she has carried through Onyx since its beginning: hospitality as a practiced discipline, not a greeting pasted onto a coffee bar. A coffee professional since 2002, Allen co-founded Onyx Coffee Lab with Jon Allen, whose role as Co-Founder & CEO reaches across green-coffee purchasing, quality control, hospitality design, architecture, branding and the business structure that holds the company’s Arkansas cafes and roastery together. The Springdale cafe opened in May 2025, returning Onyx to Downtown Springdale with a larger expression of its method. Andrea’s public competition record sits behind the service rather than in front of it: she won the 2020 United States Barista Championship and finished second at the 2022 World Barista Championship. Here, that time on the tools reads in the sequence of the room, the barista at the counter, the guest choosing between a Kenya pour-over and a composed drink, the food set beside it without hurry.
Coffee, chocolate and the measured bar
The coffee program at Springdale belongs to a roaster’s house. Onyx was founded in 2012, and the company describes its work through roasting, cafe service and barista training, with coffees presented by origin, process and tasting structure. One current example from the broader Onyx bench is Ethiopia Agaro Yukro G1, sourced through a long-standing relationship with Red Fox Coffee and produced by smallholder farmers in Wanja Kersa in western Agaro; the stated cup notes are Apricot, Barley Tea, Bergamot and Caramel. At Springdale, the counter carries espresso drinks, pour-over service and named Onyx drinks, including Hail Fellow Well Met and the Tiramisu latte. Food has its own place in the rhythm: breakfast sandwich, orange roll, baked goods, ice cream. The more specific Springdale signal is downstairs, where guests encounter a chocolate-making area tied to Terroir by Onyx. The chocolate work is not decorative retail. Onyx’s Terroir bars include cacao from Madagascar, Colombia and Peru, and the brand won 2024 Good Food Awards for 69% Madagascar Dark Chocolate and Chai Milk Chocolate with Pink Peppercorn.
Three floors around the bench
The room gives the program space to breathe. Springdale is a three-story cafe with capacity listed at 99, large enough for more than one pace of use without turning the counter into a waiting line. The venue has seating inside and outside, tables for groups, space for laptop work, reading and conversation, a quiet study room upstairs, and a turf area beyond the main room. The design language is polished and modern, and attention is divided between coffee at the bar, food at hand, chocolate below, and study and meetings above. Noise stays conversational. The building sits in Downtown Springdale and near the greenway, so the cafe works as both a neighborhood stop and a longer station for the day.
A return with production in view
Springdale matters because Onyx placed more of the craft where people can see it. Jon Allen’s design and operations work gives the house its architecture, while Andrea Allen’s hospitality work keeps the movement legible at the counter. The next release is not the point here; the daily measure is whether the cup, the sandwich and the chocolate area hold together under use. For this cafe, that measure is a Kenya pour-over beside Terroir’s 69% Madagascar Dark Chocolate.
