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There’s a new specialty coffee shop in Palo Alto brought to you by a team of wedding photographers.
Husband and wife Marc Sayeed and Gia Salah, owners of a Palo Alto-based photography business, soft-opened Covour Coffee on May 28 and plan to have the cafe’s grand opening in late June. The Midtown cafe offers specialty lattes (like burnt honey, dirty ube, pandan, tiramisu), traditional coffee drinks, pour overs, teas and refreshers. In addition to beverages, find baked goods from Mountain View-based The Midwife and the Baker and Daly City-based Filipino bakery La Kalidad.
“My wife and I have always wanted to open a cafe … but we were so busy with our jobs,” Sayeed said. “And then back in 2023, we’re like, ‘We got to do it.’”
Sayeed and Salah chose to bring their coffee business to Midtown in part because they noticed a lack of coffee shops in the area. In February 2023, a fire badly damaged the local Philz Coffee, permanently closing the location and leaving only one coffee shop, Palo Alto Cafe, in Midtown. So in June 2023, Sayeed and Salah signed their lease along Middlefield Road, offering their photographer Willson Voong partnership in the venture.
“We’ve been into coffee our whole lives,” Sayeed said. “So we’re kind of like, I wouldn’t say coffee snobs, but we really know our coffee well.”
All syrups, sauces and creams are made in-house, and the team “dials in,” or calibrates the espresso machine, every hour to make sure that the extraction is precise. Covour Coffee roasts Colombian fair trade beans out of a warehouse in Newark and plans to begin roasting inside its cafe mid-June, at which point the cafe will offer light, medium and dark roasts (currently it offers medium) and bags of beans for purchase.
“(Our beans are) really mellow, chocolatey, nutty, toasted marshmallow and slightly fruity,” Sayeed said. “We roast our espresso every week, and we let them rest for a week, and then we’ll serve that espresso for that day. Everything is very fresh.”
The name Covour Coffee is a combination of the word “coffee” and “flavour.” Sayeed said he hopes to eventually have multiple locations and sell his roasted coffee at Whole Foods and local stores.
Covour Coffee, 2706 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto; 510-857-3704, Instagram: @covourcoffee. Open Monday through Saturday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
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