James Bondurant is an owner of Honest Coffee Roasters and Acai Cafe in Homewood.
Q: Tell us briefly about the restaurant.
A: Hello, my name is James Bondurant. I'm one of the owners of Honest Coffee Roasters and Acai Cafe over in Homewood in the Edgewood area. Coffee comes from a cherry fruit, a lot of people don't know that. Our unique spin on the coffee shop is that we're a fruit place that specializes in coffee and a lot of other fresh and healthy food options. In addition to having some of the best coffee in Birmingham, we specialize in acai bowls, smoothies, breakfast, toast, parfaits, overnight oats, and we fresh squeeze juices every morning to make sure they're always packed with vitamins and nutrients for our guests. There are not enough food places in Alabama who truly care about the health and well-being of their guests. We want to take care of our guests and make sure they're taking care of themselves. We like for guests to leave on this coffee, feeling like they've done something beneficial for themselves that day. So, if you're someone who's having trouble getting enough vitamins and minerals in their daily diet, come see us. We would love to have you.
Q: How’d you get started in the industry?
A: Taking care of yourself has always been something that's very important to me. I was a math teacher for the past seven years, and, even though I was teaching math, I spent a lot of time in my math class just trying to help my students live an active and healthy lifestyle. So many kids nowadays aren't being raised to take care of themselves the way they should, so that was always very important to me even in my math classroom. And today that's something I still wanna do. I wanna help guests take care of themselves. It's not always easy to get the fresh fruit and veggies that you need every day, so, at Honest Coffee, we make it a little bit easier for you to get those vitamins and nutrients that you need on a daily basis.
Q: What’s your favorite part about working in the industry?
A: My favorite part about working at Honest Coffee: I'm a retired middle school math teacher. I definitely got a coffee addiction during that time. But, one thing I like even more than being around coffee, is helping the community. We help the community by providing fresh fruit, healthy food options and drink options to make sure everybody's getting their daily vitamins and minerals they need. And we also provide free math homework help in the mornings and math tutoring in the afternoons. We want to make sure we take care of our community.
Q: What is your favorite item on the menu and why?
A: Besides our coffee, my favorite menu item at Honest Coffee Roasters and Acai Cafeis our fresh squeezed juices. Whenever you juice fruit and vegetables, these vitamins and minerals, they go away so fast. So, what we do, is we juice every single morning and only make enough for the day. Today, our Juice of theDay was called "One in a Melon." We used watermelon, pineapple, lime, apple, ginger and mint to make our Juice of the Day.
Q: What sets you apart from your competitors?
A: It's one thing to say you care about your guests, but actions speak louder than words. Most food places in Alabama serve their guests poison. The quality of healthiness in the food that we eat on a daily basis in Alabama is not very good. If you truly care about your guests, you don't let them destroy their bodies with bad food. Here at Honest Coffee, we specialize in fresh fruit, healthy options. We wanna make sure our guests are taking care of themselves and, when they leave here, they feel better about themselves.
Q: Anything new or upcoming we should know?
A: Here at Honest Coffee, we make all of our flavored syrup from scratch ourselves. And, if fruits are involved, we juice those fruits that we need to make our syrups. Every season we change our seasonal syrups. This summer, we had the Honey Berry, the Peachy Day and the Orange Dreamsicle. In September, we are gonna start our fall seasonal flavors. Come by and try them.
