Now open in Stillwater: Mike and Kat’s Other Place, a cozy espresso bar

Jared Kaufman, Pioneer Press
Updated ·5 min read

This isn’t just any ol’ place: It’s Mike and Kat’s Other Place.

Married duo Mike and Kat Duncan opened the cozy, colorful coffee shop and roastery in early February in Stillwater’s North Hill neighborhood.

The menu is simple: Espresso drinks and nitro cold brew, made with beans Mike Duncan roasts in-house, two pounds at a time.

There’s no food menu, unlike at the Duncans’ previous coffee shop, Coffee Paw Cafe, which was on the south side of town and closed in November 2022.

The most unique item may actually be their standard hot coffee, which is not drip coffee but rather steamed nitro cold brew — an unusual move that highlights both the lower acidity of cold-brewed coffee, which is steeped for many hours, and the smoothness of running the coffee through a nitrogen tap.

The shop is housed in an 1880s-era building that the Duncans have rehabbed with an eclectic, vintage vibe. They installed a retro tin-style ceiling above the coffee shop and have family china and heirlooms displayed in a massive wooden icebox cabinet they found in the building. Hanging on the walls are funky textile swatches in old frames that once held family photos.

In addition to the coffee bar and 12 seats, including window nooks, the shop also includes three fully built-out salon rooms for independent stylists to rent.

Mike and Kat have built the kind of place they didn’t have to think twice about attaching their names to.

“We had culinary careers, and then corporate careers — and this is our heart,” Kat Duncan said.

“This is our other place”

It was summer 2007, and the Gear Daddies were playing a concert on Harriet Island.

Kat Duncan narrates the story like a romantic comedy meet-cute. She’d just gotten out of a relationship and wasn’t looking to meet anyone new, but “man, I wanted to flirt with everybody!”

And then she saw Mike.

“I literally picked him out of a crowd,” Kat said. “Not that one. Not that one. Not that one. That one!”

They clicked instantly: They both had food experience — Mike was a culinary school grad and former executive chef, and Kat had worked front-of-house at a couple ritzy suburban restaurants — and, at the time, they both worked in corporate recruiting. Plus, clearly, they had similar tastes in music.

Oh — and they were both miffed by how hard it was to find a good poached egg on a restaurant menu in Stillwater.

“They’ll baste an egg for ya!” Mike and Kat both said in unison, clearly a refrain over which they’ve commiserated together for years.

The couple had always talked about running some sort of bistro someday, Kat said. Maybe a coffee shop when they retired, or maybe a taco bar on the beach in Costa Rica.

But in 2019, when the Chilkoot Cafe went up for sale, they quickly decided to adjust that timeline. They bought the business, renamed it Coffee Paw Cafe and, yes, started serving poached eggs.

“We’re not risk-averse,” Mike Duncan said. “If there’s a ledge to jump off of, we’d probably give it a shot.”

Although Coffee Paw survived the worst of Covid-19 shutdowns, Kat Duncan said, other effects of the pandemic knocked the shop irreparably off-course. Egg prices alone had increased about tenfold since 2019, Mike Duncan said. Even when sales stabilized again, they realized the shop had a pre-pandemic business model and would be stuck playing a perpetual game of financial catch-up.

Within the same 30-day period in late 2022, Mike’s dad died, the couple’s dog died, Kat had brain surgery and they closed the Coffee Paw.

“When we had to shut the previous place down, Mike and I were heartbroken,” Kat Duncan said. “Literally, we grieved.”

The Coffee Paw space has since become You and Me Cafe, which opened last spring from another Stillwater food power couple, Sarah and Dariush Moslemi of The Wild Hare and Velveteen Speakeasy.

And the Duncans knew they weren’t ready to give up the idea of a neighborhood coffee shop.

So almost immediately, in 2022, the Duncans bought an old building close to home and drew up a business plan for an “other place” that was fine-tuned to a Covid-era food service landscape.

“Our house is down the street, so this is our other place,” Kat Duncan said. “If we’re not there, we’re here. When we bought the building, we just kept calling it ‘the other place’ — ‘Hey, do you want to run over to work on the other place?’ — and it stuck.”

“A lot of phase twos”

The two-story building at 807 N. 4th St, situated on a hill overlooking a small ravine, has had many lives since it was built in the 1880s, Kat Duncan said.

It’s been a Swedish church, a grocery store, an architecture firm, a pilates studio. Turning it into Mike and Kat’s Other Place required significant rehab, Mike Duncan said. Entirely new plumbing. New HVAC. New electrical wiring to completely replace the original and very outdated knob-and-tube system. Several reconstructed exterior walls. A new multi-stage water filtration system.

The upper level of the building is still under construction, and the Duncans hope to turn it into rentable office space for local businesses. That’s phase two of the project, Kat Duncan said.

They also need to replace the front door. That’s phase two, too. Packaging more house-roasted beans for sale? Also phase two.

“We have a lot of phase twos,” she joked.

Community support for the cafe has been so heartwarming from day one, both Kat and Mike said. Their old regulars are traveling the literal extra mile to the north hill to see them. The coffee shop’s neighbors are Mike and Kat’s actual neighbors, too.

“Really,” Kat Duncan said, “we’re about the neighborhood walkers, and dogs, and people.”

Mike and Kat’s Other Place is open Tuesdays through Fridays from 7:30 a.m. until around 2 p.m., Saturdays from 8 a.m. to around 2 p.m. and Sundays from 8 a.m. to around noon. Closed Mondays.

Mike and Kat’s Other Place: 807 N. 4th St, Stillwater; 651-491-2202; mikeandkatsotherplace.com

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