If you like truly special coffee—or truly special pastries—you need to stop by.
Veron Ennis is passionate about cold brew. If you ask her, she’ll tell you that the cold brew at her shop, Joan + Joe, comes from a signature blend of organic beans, roasted dark in Maryland by a family that knows the farmers in South America who grew them. It’s brewed in small batches overnight every night—the big-batch experiments that she and her husband and business partner, Duncan Ennis, tried just didn’t taste as good—with filtered, alkalized water. Cold brew in general is smoother and less acidic than hot-brewed coffee, she’ll make sure you know, so people tend to use less sugar and milk—meaning more pure coffee flavor.
Started in Charles Town in 2021 by the Ennises, Joan + Joe is named for the owners’ patron saints. The couple opened their second shop earlier this month in the cellar of St. John University Parish’s Newman Hall on University Avenue, just below WVU’s downtown campus.
Joan + Joe serves its cold brew cold or hot. You can get espresso drinks there, too—in fact, one of Ennis’s favorite drinks is The Drogo, named for the patron saint of coffee: a cup of cold brew, hot or iced, with an added shot of espresso. It’s a red eye made with cold brew.
The shop aims to please every customer. There’s a long menu of suggested regular and over-the-top specialty coffee drinks. “If you get an iced mocha, it automatically comes with the entire cup swirled in chocolate, the whipped cream on top, chocolate on top of that—the full circus,” Ennis laughs. “But if you want less, we can do that, too.” And by all means, customize away. Joan + Joe’s baristas have all of the syrups and sauces and milks at hand, and they are delighted to meet your specifications. It’s part of the coffee shop’s mission: “to treat every person that walks through that door like they’re the most important person in the world every day, every minute,” Ennis says.
If you like the cold brew, you can buy it in a half-gallon or gallon growler that you can trade in for a full one on your next visit.
Enough about the coffee. If Ennis is passionate about cold brew, don’t even get her started on pastries. “I don’t know how many croissants I ate before I settled on the one we have,” she says. It’s all-butter, which she says tastes best with coffee—she did the taste tests to know. The croissants and all of the shop’s pastries—there are cakes, cookies, tarts, brownies, and more—arrive from the Ennises’ chosen suppliers ready to bake, and they’re baked fresh every day.
The shop’s sandwiches come on croissants or croissant buns. Most popular in Charles Town is the Bacon Jam: baked turkey breast and hardwood-smoked bacon with provolone, lettuce, bacon jam, and mayo. But in Morgantown, she says, it’s the Brie + Turkey, which adds to those a blend of raspberry and balsamic jams topped with pralines.
Joan + Joe is in the freshly decorated cellar of Newman Hall—enter around the left side and down a few steps. The highlight is a four-wall mural. “Sarah Gallahan came in from Winchester, Virginia,” Ennis says. “She did the Blue Ridge Mountain range on three sides of the restaurant and, on the fourth, it’s the university and downtown, with iconic buildings placed in the right places, and it goes from nighttime to daytime. I think it makes it a really unique space.”
The shop has a small parking lot that can be entered from University or Beechurst, and there’s metered parking on University. Go today or tomorrow to try one of the Valentine’s specials—come March, it’ll be all green and shamrocks.
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