Café Thrives in Nearly Abandoned Strip Mall

Mesa, AZ – There’s a victim on the North East corner of Greenfield Road and University Drive.

Boarded up, grafittied, overgrown weeds — the former gas station stands after a lifetime of abuse.

On that same corner, 17 other retail spaces plea for someone to save them. For lease signs sit in their dusty windows, paint missing where sign letters once were – this place once bustled with life, before the Fry’s Food and Drug store that anchored the strip center moved out more than six years ago.

Fry’s leaving should have killed the center. But five businesses in there still hang by a thread, even if passersby wonder how they make rent each month.

That is, all of them but one.

Red Mountain Café is the heartbeat of the limp strip mall that reeks of days gone by. At 8:45 a.m. on a Monday morning Red Mountain had 21 cars parked outside—that was after the breakfast “rush,” said Kathy Thompson, the owner of the café—and inside a rich coffee aroma and an equally pungent buttery spice scent lingers in the air. It must be the homemade, too-big-for-the-plate-they’re-served-on cinnamon rolls.

The café thrives, although Thompson doesn’t pretend like it isn’t penetrable by the sword of the heartless economy.

“We’re seeing restaurants close everyday. It’s happening, it’s real and it’s scary because it could happen to us,” she said.

This is the first year Thompson didn’t spend $600 per month advertizing so that she could put that money toward the bills, and it’s the first year she felt a “little twinge” in the summer. She questioned whether it was the lack of advertising or the worsening economy.

In order to make up for the slow summer, Red Mountain Café depends on the visitors—or snowbirds—that are abundant December through March.

“Our profits quadruple and those four months carry us through the other eight months,” said Thompson.

If it weren’t for the many mobile home parks in such close proximity to the café, Thompson is convinced the café would close down every summer and that she would lease in another, less ghostly strip mall.

“I wish I could relocate, but it’s the perfect location for us because of all the senior living around and I’d be scared to go somewhere else,” she said.

The foundation of Red Mountain Café’s success is the relationships that have formed between the servers and the customers.

“They (seniors) come here as an extended family. It might not always be about the food—it might be the servers and the socializing,” Thompson said.

She apologized after she finished her sentence to greet an old man who walked through the door.

“Hi Kathy, it’s really cooling down around here,” he said. He seemed anxious to tell her it was “about the time of year for him to pull out his long underwear.”

Kathy laughed a genuine, hearty laugh. “Oh Gene,” she said with a toothy smile.

Another apology and back to the interview.

“Where were we?” she said. “That’s right, ‘it’s not always the food.’ They do love the liver and onions for dinner, though,” Thompson says grimacing and sticking out her tongue. “This is home cooking, it’s not a chain and seniors honor the mom-and-pop diners.”

In 2007 Red Mountain’s lease was up for renewal and the developer convinced them to stay by feeding them empty promises about soon-to-be leased spaces. So they expanded the place by about a third to accommodate the particularly busy winters.

But she still doesn’t understand why people are willing to wait up to an hour and a half for Sunday breakfast. She’s quick to say she wouldn’t want to wait around, but she’s not complaining.

Neither is Fred and Barbara Plante.

“We’re willing to wait because they’re just so nice in here and it’s not too expensive– the price is right and we’re in no hurry, anyway” said Barbara Plante, a regular at Red Mountain.

The economy’s tugging at its strings, but the heart of the strip mall keeps pumping.

Thompson doesn’t expect the rest of the corner to be revived any time soon, though. And it seems the surrounding neighborhood has lost hope, too.

“I have heard for years that different places were going to open in there, but nothing ever does. At this point, that corner is nothing more than an eyesore that I’m sick of driving by, and I’d hate to see that café go under because of it,” said Aaron Rogers, a Mesa resident who lives within one mile of the strip mall.

Guest article contributed by Chelci Vaughan, Student
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

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