After two years of toil, owners open Cafe Chill in downtown Waldport in vastly remodeled video store

 

By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews

WALDPORT – Diana Buckley finally has the coffee shop that she has been dreaming about. But it’s really more than that.

Café Chill is open in the former — but now vastly remodeled — building that once housed Waldport Video and its beloved owner Chuck Hill.

After three weeks of a slow rollout, Buckley is expanding her hours, menu and hiring staff to soon be open for breakfast, lunch and dinner from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week.

“I think Chuck would be happy,” Buckley said last week during a two-day closure to work on menus and staffing. “It turned out very much like the vision we had.”

That means colorful walls – and likely soon murals outside. Wood for the front counter and tables came the floor of the old Waldport Middle School that had been salvaged by Quayle Builders. “I hand-scraped every one of those boards,” Buckley says, expressing after-the-fact surprise that she did it.

There are special tulip-shaped glass fixtures by Michael Crawley of Tidewater and stained glass by artist Chuck Franklin of Waldport.

Much of it was put together by Adam Glasgow, a Waldport contractor who came on as a partner in the building when Buckley needed help and advice. “We bounced ideas off each other for months on building and decorating ideas, she says.

Other partners in ownership of the building are Buckley’s daughter, Jamie Green and her wife, Melissa, of Corvallis. The kitchen operation is a separate company, with Buckley partnering with Robert Bradford and Branden Baker of Yachats to operate it.

Café Chill has 12 full and part-time employees and was hiring earlier this week so it could gradually expand hours into the evening.

“This will give us a chance to test everything out and get everything and everyone up to speed,” Buckley said.

The restaurant has seating for 44, a stage that will eventually hold everything from music, to open mic nights, comedy, and children’s performances.

“We’re going to continue Chuck’s legacy of working with local kids,” Buckley said. “I’d really like to inspire younger kids to come in.”

There will also be opportunities for youth as young as 14 to work and learn the restaurant trade, she said.

Walls in the back are available for artists to show their work; paintings by Hill already line one wall and more are coming soon from Hill’s longtime friend from Bend.

But opening the door (even that was an issue) wasn’t simple.

Buckley, 66, already has a full-time job as finance director for RiffTrax, an online media company that takes movies or educational films and over-dubs them with commentary by comedians. But it was conversations with longtime friend Jamie Michel of Tidewater – “We need a sit-down coffee shop in Waldport” – that convinced her to take the plunge of buying the old video store and going to work remodeling it.

Buckley bought the building on Commercial Street in November 2021, just after her 65^th birthday.

Nearly $500,000 later it’s open.

Everything in the kitchen is new stainless equipment. Problems with an improperly installed stove hood stalled the café’s opening for months. But Buckley and Glasgow used that time to add an employee-only restroom, a storeroom, research, buy and install a water filter system to remove chemicals from the city water (“It made all the difference in the coffee,” she says) and eventually replace a troublesome double front door with hard-to-find parts with a single 42-inch wide single door.

Everything – even the bagels – the café serves is made on site. Hours have now expanded through lunch to 2 p.m. and dinner with a limited menu including beer and wine in another week or two, Buckley says.

“We’re very pleased with how it turned out,” Buckley said.