Ten years ago Nathaneal Johnson opened Cafe Mosaic on 2nd Street in Eunice.
The cafe began when he had his first cup of coffee with his father, Joey, who operates Christian Woodworks in Eunice, he said.
Johnson told Eunice Kiwanis Club members that he was 11 years old when he had that sip of coffee and 10 years later he was opening Cafe Mosaic.
“I really did fall in love with it,” he said of coffee.
When he was 16 years old, he started thinking about opening a cafe after deciding there was no future for him in the music business.
He dropped out of the University of Louisiana Lafayette where he was attending to study business, returned home to Eunice and started doing what needed to be done to turn a thought about a coffee shop into reality.
The start was all about timing, he said.
He found the building on 2nd Street where the shop is located when he was 20 years old.
The building was a mess and the location was questionable, he said.
“One rule for opening a coffee shop is never open up on a one-way street,” he said.
And he heard that a cup of coffee was available elsewhere.
“We can get coffee at the gas station and my reply was if they can make better coffee than me at the gas station then I shouldn’t be in business,” he said.
Johnson said his parents helped him buy the building. He reassured them with, “... I’m sure of this. I know I am going to work hard to make sure this works.’
Johnson was employed in his father’s shop and in the evenings worked on renovating the building, which was a process that lasted about six months, he said.
He started with three employees and ended up working 100-plus hours a week.
Cafe Mosaic was intended to be a place where people could form a community, he said. “I wanted a place, a business where people have meetings, students study,” he said.
Johnson said he liked the downtown location and three of his present four locations fill that bill.
“We all know downtowns are the heart of the city,” he said.
But his second location was at Acadiana Medical Center and it closed within seven months, he said.
“Failures are light posts to success and I really believe that without failure, without understanding the fear of failure you can’t move forward because a lot of times fear will entrap you from making that step forward,” he said.
The failure of the hospital location “literally almost crippled Mosaic,” he said.
He said he sat down with is father and came up with a plan for success, but also had to ask for financial help to pay the bills.
Next, he rented a coffee shop in Lafayette, but decided that was not what he wanted and left.
He went to Portland, Oregon; California; and Seattle to learn how to roast coffee.
Johnson began roasting coffee at a rented location in Lafayette and added a coffee shop.
His roasting operation sold to more than 20 accounts, which included supplying all of the Whole Foods in Louisiana, he said.
Next, he started Java Square Cafe on the Courthouse Square in Opelousas.
The building where he was roasting coffee went up for sale and Johnson ended up opening Rêve Coffee Roasters at 200 Jefferson Street in Lafayette. He has added a 40-pound roaster to his first 11-pound roaster.
Additionally, he has opened Campus Grounds at 501 E. Saint Mary in Lafayette.
The Jefferson Street shop has been in operation about a year and half and supplies more than 30 locations including Whole Foods in Louisiana.
Johnson said the roasting shop has been featured as a top 10 roaster in the country, top five in the South and top roaster in the state.
The business has grown to more than 30 employees, he said.
The master plan is to open four more locations, he said.
“We are a micro-roaster. We roast in small batches,” which he said provides his operation a niche that Starbucks, CC’s House and other major coffee seller cannot reach.
“They are the fast food of coffee,” he said.
Johnson plans a 10-year anniversary celebration for Cafe Mosaic in late March.
