Janey’s Cafe brings new flavor to Coleman

COLEMAN – Kylee Renier, a recent graduate of Coleman High School, opened her own business at 200 Sunset Ave. in Coleman and named it in honor of her paternal grandmother.

“My grandma adopted my dad and his three brothers when they were young, and she’s always been my biggest role model,” Renier said. “We lived five minutes away from each other when I was growing up, so we’d take our bikes there, drive the four wheelers there. We were there all the time,” she said.

Renier said of all the things her grandmother loved to bake, cookies were number one, although she also baked wedding cakes for loved ones and community members. Her grandmother cooked in addition to baking, but that was reserved for non-holidays.

“We’d just order food from KFC for Christmas, because she preferred not to cook on those days,” Reinier said.

Her grandmother passed away in 2017, and Renier graduated high school shortly after.

“I went to St. Norbert and I hated it,” she said. “Now I’m a full-time online student at UW-GB, and I realized I just hate working for people. My dad put the money forward to create (the cafe), and the most natural name was after his mother.”

While Renier didn’t take any steps to open her cafe immediately after graduation, she said it had been on her mind since early high school.

“I first tried to convince my dad to buy this old station house my freshman or sophomore year of high school,” Renier said. “May of this year, I had a fully-formed idea for this place that I came to my dad with. We got everything set in stone in September and we opened on Nov. 11.”

Janey’s Cafe shares its building with Shell gas station and a Subway, and Renier said their employees quickly became regulars.

“The Subway employees come in every day, like clockwork, for lunch, and also after school for a drink before work,” she said.

Even though the cafe is only a few weeks old, the fellow tenants of 200 Sunset Ave. aren’t the only regulars.

“There’s a high schooler named Elijah. He comes in every day and he tries out all of my new drinks. If I’m worried about something tasting bad, he’ll be the first one to offer to try it,” Renier said.

Before she rented the space for the cafe, it was a craft place owned by Vicki Mutchler, and Renier liked most of her decor.

“We painted and we put up our bar area and kitchen, but we kept a lot of (Mutchler’s) ideas, like the fake brick wall. The floor is still splattered with paint, but I kept it because I like the character it adds,” Renier said.
Renier worked at coffee shops throughout high school, and one thing she knew Janey’s Cafe had to have were Lotus drinks.

“When I was in high school, we would always drive all the way up to Oconto to get Lotus drinks, because there’s nothing here that sells them and nothing in Coleman/Pound, either. You had to drive to Oconto or Crivitz,” she said.
The cafe held a soft opening on Nov. 7, where all Coleman school staff and postal service staff were invited.

“We opened up the doors to the teachers at Coleman School District, and then the fire department, EMS and the police officers in Coleman. So we opened up to them, and it was a pretty good response. My dad put more money forward to pay for everyone’s drinks, so everyone got free drinks, and we just asked for them to pay in criticism, to tell us what they think we should do, what we should change. We had a hiccup right in the morning. Our espresso machine didn’t want to heat up, so we couldn’t make any espresso drinks at all, no lattes, no cappuccinos, nothing,” Renier said. “So that set us back a little bit.

But because it was all people who knew me and were part of the community, they were very understanding and ended up just coming back later in the day, once the espresso machine was working. Overall it went pretty well. We had a lot of people in here, probably like 100 in and out.”

The official opening was on Nov. 11, and Renier said that went a bit more smoothly.

“A lot of the high schoolers were excited. Other people in the community were pretty excited, too. It was pretty busy Monday through Wednesday, and it ended up slowing down a little bit and then picked back up on the weekends.”
Renier said that having been in business only a few weeks, one of her favorite parts of running the cafe is finding out how others stumbled across it.

“I find it most interesting when people come in and tell me where they discovered that we were open. We had reached Marinette and there was a girl whose dentist had told her that about a new coffee shop in Coleman. So she came from Marinette to come here, and then people are still finding out about it here and there, mainly from our Facebook page. I have a lot of people who come up here from cabins that are messaging me saying, ‘Oh, I’m so excited to go when I come up north.’ And I’m hoping we get more people with the hunters coming up north as well,” Renier said.

Currently, the staff at Janey’s Cafe consists of Renier, her mother, and several high school students.

“They’ve made opening a lot easier on me. Pretty easy girls to train. I have my two regulars that like to work the most, Hope and Mallory. They love working here. They tell me all the time,” Renier said.

While the cafe is still brand new, Renier isn’t letting that stop her from envisioning the future.

“The main end goal is to have our own building, but until then, there is a space right next to us as well that’s open that we want to renovate to make the space bigger,” she said. “My mom likes doing photography, so I’d open up a little photography studio in there for her, and then have a bigger seating area and a small boutique type of thing. I personally struggle finding boutique clothes that I like in the area. I think they’re more aimed towards middle aged women, 30s to 50s, and that’s not the type of clothes that I wear. So I want to have boutique clothes that younger women would wear, and then space that people can rent out for birthday parties, baby showers and stuff like that.”

More information about Janey’s Cafe can be found on their website at https://janeys-cafe-coleman.squarespace.com/.