FAIRHAVEN – After opening her café truck in Nov 2021,The Rescue Cafe is now moving off the road and into a building on Main Street.

“This building just means everything to me,” said Joni Rhodes, owner of the café, with tears in her eyes. “It’s the accumulation of my whole life's work, this is what I've done my entire life.”

After serving out of the trailer on Titleist Drive for 16 months, Rhodes said she would run out of food every day and she couldn’t hire additional employees to assist her because she didn’t have a bathroom.

“I was at my maximum capacity. As one person, I was doing like the absolute most I could,” she said. “Because I couldn't produce more. I was kind of starting to disappoint people.”

Rhodes said after six months of looking for a building, she jumped on the 414 Main St spot, a former hair salon, as she saw it as the perfect space.

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“There was nothing in here, we’ve done everything to get it ready,” Rhodes said, adding the cafe will initially be open Wednesday to Sunday 6 a.m. to 3 p.m.

She hopes to eventually be open six or seven days a week, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Inside the new Rescue Café

When people enter the café, there is a seating room, small bar area with stools, and ordering area as well as a back room with booths for a more private sitting area.

There is also a retail section that will be rented out by different artists every month. This month, a local artist who does pet portraits and other watercolor landscapes will be utilizing the space. There will be a woman who sells plants, and another woman who sells candles, next on the agenda.

Rhodes said they will also still sell their usual dog cookies, stickers and pins.

But, the most exciting part of the café for Rhodes is her big commercial gas oven. “I’ve been waiting my entire adult life to own that piece of equipment,” she said with a big smile.

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“Because I have the oven, I can make whatever I want.”

Additionally, the café will have muffins, yogurt parfaits, brownies, donuts from New Bedford's USA Homemade Donuts.

Rhodes said she is still donating some of the proceeds to CARE, SouthCoast Inc, a volunteer-run, no-kill, 501c3 animal rescue/shelter.

"[The owner] takes on a lot of cats that other people would say no to," Rhodes said, adding as an example a cat that might need an expensive surgery, rehabilitation or behavioral issues.

“That’s why we’re always going to continue to support CARE.”

How it all started

The Arizona native said she has worked in bakeries since the night she graduated high school. "It was always my dream to have my own place," Rhodes said.

She moved to the Cape and worked as a general manager at Pie in the Sky in Woods Hole, and The Daily Brew in Bourne.

“I got an extremely well-rounded understanding of how a restaurant works, what a restaurant needs, how to manage employees and customer service," she said.

“They're just very high volume, fast paced environments. I'm grateful for them both. I wouldn't feel comfortable doing this without the level of experience that I have.”

After working nearly a decade in the café industry, she finally decided it was time to "step off the cliff" and open her own business. She saw a food trailer for sale on Facebook Market and purchased it with her boyfriend, Anthony Brown.

From truck to brick & mortar

Upon opening on Main Street, Rhodes said she sold the trailer to a woman who owns the catering company Mobile Munchies in the Cape Cod area.

“I sold it to a girl who worked at the same restaurant that I spent eight years of my life working at,” she said. “We never worked there at the same time as each other. It was a total coincidence.”

Although Rhodes misses her trailer, she hopes the community will embrace her new location just the same. “I'm so happy that everybody likes my coffee so much, which really does make me happy,” she added.

In the distant future, Rhodes hopes to open the backyard area in which people can bring their dogs and walk up to the back door and order from there.

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“The Rescue Café really is about a sense of community. It is something that we really tried to portray in the trailer,” she said.

“I want people to just really feel at home while they're here. That's the most important thing.”

Standard-Times staff writer Seth Chitwood can be reached at schitwood@s-t.com. Follow him on twitter: @ChitwoodReports.Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Standard-Times today.

This article originally appeared on Standard-Times: Expansion in works for Rescue Cafe with permanent location open