PLEASANT GAP — From a bottle shop to a bakery.
The Red Horse Tavern, located in Pleasant Gap, now has a café. The Tiny Tavern Café opened its doors in June. Co-owners Natalie Valdivia and Victor Visciani reopened the Red Horse in 2022. The bottle shop sat empty for several months before its conversion to a café.
“It used to be the bottle shop. We were going to reopen the bottle shop eventually, but beer prices keep going up,” Valdivia explained. “We felt like we couldn’t compete with grocery stores and gas stations. So, we thought, ‘What else can we do with it?’ We didn’t want to just leave it empty, so we said, ‘Let’s do a coffee shop.’”
Pleasant Gap now boasts three coffee shops and bakeries. There’s the Cakeshop by Tati, which is a block over from the Red Horse on state Route 26. There’s also Café Luna along state Route 144.
According to Valdivia, the response has been “good so far.”
The Tiny Tavern Café offers a wide variety of coffee drinks and baked goods. The most popular items, according to Valdivia, are the beignets. A beignet is a French pastry that is light and fluffy. They are deep fried, which results in a golden-brown exterior with a soft and pillowy interior. They are covered in powdered sugar, making them all the sweeter.
“Those have been the most popular,” Valdivia said.
She noted that the pretzel bread breakfast sandwiches are “catching on.”
“We make the pretzel bread in house,” Valdivia said.
Since Valdivia also owns and operates The Red Horse Tavern, she typically slides from café to Red Horse mode as soon as the café closes for the day. She said it can get overwhelming at times.
“Sometimes, yeah,” Valdivia said with a laugh. “I go straight from here to over there. It’s right into it.”
At the end of the day, Valdivia said opening the café really seemed like a no-brainer.
“I am a big coffee drinker. I used to stop every day and buy coffee. It really became a ‘why not?’ We have a little bit of everything,” Valdivia said.
Valdivia said Tiny Tavern uses Café Lemont coffee, keeping everything local.
She hopes that the Tiny Tavern Café will be open for a long, long time.
“It’s just a tiny little space,” Valdivia said, “but we love it.”
The Tiny Tavern Café is located at 104 N. Main St. in Pleasant Gap. It is open Tuesday through Saturday, 7 a.m. until 11 a.m. For more information about the Tiny Tavern Café, check out their Facebook page.
