Dash Coffee Roasters opens new location in Uptown Marion

MARION — About six years ago, the Dash Coffee Roasters owner spoke her new Marion location into existence.

In 2017, as she sat in the 170-year-old building then home to Wit’s End Coffeehouse, she planned the first Dash Coffee Roasters for Kingston Village in Cedar Rapids, which opened later that year.

“I remembered looking around and saying, ‘Someday I want to operate here, or somewhere just like here,’ ” owner Rebecca Weinbrenner said.

Little did she know that she would open another Dash location in that exact spot in December 2022.

The new opening in Uptown Marion isn’t the first time the local coffee brand has attempted to expand. Dash previously took over Veritas Cafe for a short stint in 2018, followed by a Northside Iowa City location that lasted from May 2019 to May 2021.

The former reverted to Veritas Cafe, still open today. The latter was purchased by former Dash employees and turned into Tru Coffee in 2021.

But since taking over the business as sole proprietor more than a year ago, the new site is Dash’s first attempt at expanding. After opening its flagship location ahead of Kingston Village’s growth, the new December opening is its first step into Marion.

As Uptown Marion finalizes revitalization projects and sees an influx of restaurants and businesses, the new cafe’s variety adds even more allure to the numerous reasons to visit uptown. The owner said many of Dash’s regulars have moved to Marion over the past five years, presenting an already established customer base.

“It’s fun to be part of that and add to the culture of what’s happening. … We’ve gone through lots of changes, but Cedar Rapids was always our home hub,” Weinbrenner said. “With Marion being an arm of Cedar Rapids with such intertwined communities, it was always in sight to expand.”

The menu

Inside the Marion location, Dash carries over its coffee and espresso menu from Cedar Rapids, in addition to its housemade pastries.

With a smaller space, the Marion location has not duplicated the more expansive breakfast and lunch menu found at its Cedar Rapids location.

Emphasizing traditional coffee drinks, Dash offers housemade syrups and rotating favorites. Coffee drinkers will find a slightly different philosophy behind their roasts, which also are done in-house.

With all single-origin beans, Dash doesn’t roast coffee on a light to dark spectrum, but rather in a custom way that brings out the inherent fruit accents of each bean.

“We’re bringing out the flavor we can,” Weinbrenner said.

Coffee is sourced from multiple countries, but local coffee drinkers have a strong preference for the Guatemalan and Ethiopian roasts.

Creating a space

Inside a 170-year-old building restored after extensive derecho damage is a few rooms with a kitschy array of secondhand furniture and board games that fit the aura of the old house.

“I love being in a place that’s literally a home,” Weinbrenner said. “This started out as someone’s house. It brings that feeling into the coffee.”

After living Chicago for several years, the Williamsburg native and Mount Mercy University grad moved back to her hometown. Unable to settle into a small town after living in a large city, Cedar Rapids was a city with a size in which she felt most at home.

After finding her home, she hopes the expansion will help others find comfort in a space where they feel seen, too.

“When we train our staff, we train on caring about people more than caring about coffee. Their job is to care about people,” Weinbrenner said. “We live in a world that’s behind a lot of screens. We always joke we’re daytime bartenders — we want to know your story and be part of your life.”

After settling back in Cedar Rapids nine years ago, she continued working in the food industry she’d worked in most of her life, to give her time to articulate the direction she wanted to go. After working at several coffee shops in the Coralville and Iowa City area, she fell in love with the people and community built at cafes, where banter across the bar happens at 6 a.m. instead of 6 p.m.

“I fell in love with not as much the coffee, but the community,” she said. “It’s about creating community, and I happen to do that through coffee — because there’s no better way to sit down and have a relationship with somebody than with a cup of coffee.”

Dash is named for the punctuation mark that appears on headstones between a year of birth and year of death. To her, it represents the passions of one’s life and what they did with it.

“For us, this is how we fill our dash,” she said. “This is what we’re living our lives to do — create space for people.”

Although running a food-based business has become exponentially more challenging since she started in 2017, she said the space she built in Cedar Rapids sustained the business through thick and thin.

For the owner and her staff, venturing to do that in Marion is a new privilege.

“People (go) where they feel valued,” Weinbrenner said. “We delve into people’s lives so they have a reason to delve into ours.”

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