Opening Bell Coffee

Coffee, tea and a kolache to go with it

The coffee at Opening Bell runs on espresso, specialty blends and a House Blend, and the drink worth knowing by name is the Black Eye: a sixteen-ounce drip coffee with two shots of espresso dropped into it. That is the order for a long evening or an early start, and it tells you the bar is not precious about strength.

Tea is a real part of the menu rather than an afterthought, with Harney & Sons silk tea, Cultured Cup loose leaf and David Rio chai all on the list, and beer and wine come out later in the day. Food stays in a light café lane: kolaches, sandwiches, soup, salad and desserts, served across the operating hours rather than in a narrow window.

A basement room that turns into a stage

The room sits in the basement of the South Side on Lamar lofts, inside the old Sears Roebuck building south of downtown Dallas, and the café and the performance space share one setting rather than splitting into two identities. Comfortable chairs and free Wi-Fi make it a sit-down coffeehouse as much as a counter stop, so the day stretches from studying and working through lunch and into a show.

Music is the other half of the business, most nights of the week. The calendar carries open mic nights, scheduled performances, live podcast sessions and ticketed shows, and the open mic is billed as the longest running in Dallas. The Dallas Observer named it Best Stage for Singer Songwriters in 2021, which is the clearest measure of what the room is for once the coffee rush has passed.

Order the Black Eye, then decide about lunch

Start with the Black Eye. It is the most specific thing on the coffee list and the one order that carries the character of the place. For a simpler stop, the House Blend paired with a kolache is the grab-and-go combination the venue itself points to, and it is hard to improve on before nine in the morning.

If the visit is turning into a meal, the sandwiches, soup and salad cover it without pulling the room into restaurant territory, and the desserts hold up beside a second coffee. Later, the tea list and the chais are the better call, or beer and wine if you are staying for a set. The whole menu runs across the day, so an order made for a work session and an order made for a show come from the same counter.