Located in downtown Mount Pleasant, Pleasant City Coffee lives up to its name. It’s a quaint coffee shop and an ideal location to meet with friends, study or just grab the shop’s specialty Banana-nut latte and people-watch from the windows.

The shop is open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Tuesday it’s only open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., based on the fact that there’s been no foot traffic on Tuesdays.

Owner Joshua Agardy has managed the shop for three-and-a-half years, as well as filling any vacant server positions. As summer approaches and the two current employees — both Central Michigan University students — plan to leave town. Agardy is on the lookout for a new hire to fill in on weekends over the summer.

How would you describe the atmosphere of the establishment?

Agardy: “It’s a very relaxed atmosphere, it’s very focused on studying or visiting. We’re kid-friendly and I work with one of my babies once or twice a week.”

What kind of services do you provide?

We provide great coffee to a great community. That’s our product line, that’s our byline — Pleasant City is a pleasant place to be.

What is your shops speciality?

Our specialty is the quality of coffee and the sourcing. The coffees we get are sourced directly from farmers, for quality and for efficiency. (We want) the farmer to get more of the resources back, so it’s roasted to perfection by Uncommon Coffee Roasters. They’ve done this for 20 years and I believe they have the best sourcing and the best roasting techniques in science, that we could possibly get. The quality of our coffee stands for itself and I give them all the credit — I serve it the way they request me to do so.

Nicole Lenz | Staff Photographer
Pleasant City Coffee owner Joshua Agardy at work in his coffee shop on Feb. 15

What inspired you to open a coffee shop?

I opened the coffee shop because there was not a coffee shop in downtown Mount Pleasant three-and-a-half years ago. I figured, being from here and living all over the country, to come back and open a special coffee shop in my hometown. To fill the vacancy of an actual coffee shop, where people can meet and greet and have a great cup of coffee and study or just enjoy taking a step away from the outside world.

How has business been going?

It’s picked up again here — January is always slow, so February the start of getting busy again which is always nice. The weather breaks and people want ice drinks and ice lattes to walk down to the parks and enjoy the beautiful weather.

It’s always good for us when the weather gets better. Winter is hard — people don’t like to get out of their cars for the cold weather.

What kind of reactions have you received from the community?

(It’s been) all positive. There’s a lot of stars — we got five stars on the Google site and the Facebook page. We’re doing a good thing here — a lot of things we do for compassion. (For example), we do a dollar for a bag of coffee for the homeless shelter, a lot of the products we buy from our supplier a dollar goes to good services down in Central America, like Ethiopia — places that I can’t travel to and make a difference.

Everything we do is around the name, which is Pleasant, making a pleasant atmosphere and a pleasant city gives people that alternative to enjoy their downtime.

What types of coffee and food do you sell?

Right now we just have bagels and all the coffees we have are single origin, direct trade, mostly medium roast, a few light roast. Most are flavor notes, so currently it’s Costa Rican.

What are your prices like?

Our prices, considering our product is short-batched, are at market level, some are below market level just because of the economic climate that we live in. Our prices are right where they should be in terms of the market demographic.

Do you have any big plans or developments for the future?

We have tossed around doing more food options but currently we’re just holding our line of good quality coffee products. Doing one thing great and many things poorly is not our business model. I like to have consistency, keeping the coffee good consistently, day after day.

What we do well is working for us currently. If we decide to open up the space a little bit more, and maybe put in more kitchen space, usable space, we’d do some breakfast ideas. Right now we have no immediate plans.