Metric Coffee Opens an All-Day Cafe in Avondale That's Full of Possibilities

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The sign on the door to Milli by Metric, which hosts its grand opening on September 10, simply reads “All Day Cafe.” That’s underselling the space at 3110 N. Kedzie Avenue in Avondale and the big plans its owners have for it.

While Milli will initially operate as a coffee shop open into the afternoon with pastries, it will eventually also offer house-baked bread and sandwiches; bottles of wine to go or to drink at the cafe; pizzas and seasonal dinner items in the evening; and a space for coffee classes and tastings. That’s in addition to the roasting for Metric Coffee already happening in the back of the century-old, barrel-vaulted brick warehouse.

And that line-up doesn’t include the other aspirations for the spot that Metric’s co-founders Darko Arandjelovic and Xavier Alexander are considering along with their collaborators: bottling their own cold-pressed juices, offering soft-serve from a to-go window, installing a wood-burning fire pit on the spacious patio, forging connections with wineries in Michigan and Wisconsin to sell a co-labelled house wine.

“We’re never short of ideas,” Alexander explained during a tour of the building in early May. “A lot of these ideas could be good; some are terrible,” he added later. “But what happens is that, over time, with more people involved, things will line up. The thing is to set it up and not force it.”

Not every scheme will work out once tried; some won’t even come to fruition. But that’s why Metric acquired such a large building: “We built the space so that we could grow into it,” Alexander said.

“We built” isn’t much of an exaggeration: Arandjelovic essentially served as project manager and led the design, working with people he knew in the construction industry to turn an industrial building that had previously housed an auto repair shop and cluttered antique store into a coffee and food production facility and cafe. (Arandjelovic and Alexander saved the sign from Olde Chicago Antique, the prior tenant, and plan to display it somewhere in Milli.)

Metric hasn’t had outside investors since Alexander left Intelligentsia to launch a new coffee roaster with Arandjelovic in Chicago in 2012, but Alexander believes that “those limitations force us to get creative, which I think is our biggest strong suit as a business,” he said. “We can dream and think big, but not in a way that we spent a lot of money – but it also looks like we did.”

High-end speakers mounted above the bar in the cafe were acquired at a bargain through a roaster who worked at Reckless Records. Arandjelovic designed a retro-futuristic light fixture himself, then found a company to 3D-print a mold for it.

“They’re really proud of doing good work,” Alexander said of Arandjelovic and the contractors. “He doesn’t take shortcuts. We want to build a space that lasts.”

That space is large for a coffee shop and cafe, even before the patio has opened, with its additional space for strollers and kids. The idiosyncratic design has a jazzy, funky feel that draws on both midcentury modernism and the ’70s, with alternating orange- and periwinkle-topped tables, wood-planked walls and ceilings, large plants sprouting from the middle of communal tables, and exposed brick arches.

Even with the plentiful room, Milli has already seen lines out the door during a soft opening, thanks to loyal Metric customers, curious neighbors in an area without many coffee shops, social media buzz, and perhaps a boost from The Bear. Metric has provided coffee for the set of the extraordinarily popular show for the past two years, and branded bags of their coffee have occasionally appeared in the background of shots. But the Milli space was featured thoroughly in the latest season, as an under-construction restaurant space toured by one of the characters.

Milli has been in the works for as long as Metric has been working with The Bear, and it will continue to evolve and expand as more money comes in and more staff is hired. The first lead member of the new team is Louise “Lou” Turner, who previously worked at Obélix. Her ambitious pastries include a mushroom-shaped cross-laminated bun filled with peach jam in the “stem” and ganache in the “cap.” Pain au chocolate is glossy from a chocolate glaze, while a garlic twist provides a savory option and cookies include a buckwheat biscuit and “campfire cookie” with tea, marshmallow, and graham cracker.

Turner is using locally produced flour from Janie’s Mill, and Alexander wants to carry a commitment to sustainable sourcing through all of Milli’s offerings, including food. Metric sources directly from small coffee growers, aiming to ethically navigate an often extractionary industry and provide information to customers in the form of regular transparency reports. (Milli patrons can get a literal look behind the scenes through windows from the cafe into the skylit roasting area.) He’s also intrigued by incorporating into the food program influences and ingredients from some of the regions where Metric sources coffee, such as Ethiopia, Honduras, or Peru.

That’s just another plan of many to be tried out in the new, full-of-possibility Milli space. “We get excited about what things could look like a year out,” Alexander said. “But we need to start small.”