Building a ‘HUB’: West Village coffee shop, eatery to open in March

Work is underway on West Village’s first coffee shop, its first restaurant and its first store.

Designed with the help of a student focus group, they are to open in March next door to one another as HUB Café, HUB Kitchen and HUB Market.

Behind the project is West Village Community Partnership LLC,  led by San Francisco-based Carmel Partners and venture partner Urban Villages of Denver.

The cafe will feature a traditional coffee shop menu, while the restaurant will sell pizzas, sandwiches, burgers and salads and the market groceries and sundries. A spokesman said on Friday that student-grown produce will be used whenever possible.

To run HUB, the owners have enlisted Gaithersburg, Maryland-based food services company Sodexo, Inc., which manages UC Davis’ dinning commons, the Silo and residence hall convenient stores, among other campus outlets.

The number of workers Sodexo plans to hire wasn’t immediately available on Friday.

HUB has a website, http://www.hubwestvillage.com, which for now only shows a landing page with a logo stamped onto a wood-style background.

Altogether, the cafe, restaurant and store will fill about 5,600 square feet on West Village’s town square.

That leaves 6,900 square feet for the West Village Community Partnership to fill with retail and another 30,900 for which UCD is reportedly eyeing office, commercial or other non-retail uses.

While West Village has The Center: a 15,000 square foot fitness center, with media, study and meeting rooms and swimming pool, the new neighborhood has lacked the sort of close-by eateries and convenience shopping HUB is designed to provide.

About 1,470 students call the of West Village’s two high-end, energy-efficient apartment complexes home (construction is underway on a third, Solstice, similar to its sister complex, The Rambles). The $7.4 million, 20,000 square foot  Sacramento City College Community Center, opened in January 2012, provides classes for about 2,400 students annually.

When completed, the $280 million, 200-acre West Village is designed to be home for 4,500 students, faculty and staff.

Cory Golden

The Enterprise's higher-education and congressional reporter. http://about.me/cory_golden

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