Lower Coast Coffee is opening a second New Orleans location at 5039 Freret Street on October 5, bringing its small-batch roasts to a stretch of Uptown long dominated by bars and student hangouts. The new cafe takes over a roughly 1,800-square-foot storefront that spent years as a neighborhood dive, and its owners plan to keep more than just the address intact.
According to The Tulane Hullabaloo, the space previously housed Another Bar, which hosted weekly Thursday open-mic nights and late-night Sunday karaoke before closing, according to Restaurant Guru. Lower Coast co-founder Danielle Pauli said the shop retained the bar's existing stage, with plans to use it for live music as the new location gets going. The Hullabaloo reports Lower Coast will initially run from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., with hours potentially stretching later into the evening as the business becomes established.
Lower Coast Coffee has a location at 3318 Magazine Street. The business began as a small-batch roasting operation before expanding into a physical coffee bar inside NOLA Boards, according to Lower Coast Coffee. When NOLA Boards relocated in 2025, Lower Coast moved with it and expanded the Magazine Street cafe to include dedicated indoor seating, according to the Hullabaloo's reporting.
A Different Crowd, A Different Vibe
Founders Patrick Kelly and Danielle Pauli, both Loyola University New Orleans alumni, see the Freret Street location as a chance to reach a different crowd than their Magazine Street regulars, the Hullabaloo reports. Pauli described the new space as an experiment in what a coffee shop can look like later in the day, filled mostly with secondhand furnishings meant to create a lived-in feel connected to the surrounding neighborhood.
The move lands the roaster on a stretch of Freret Street that has grown from a sleepy strip into a dense commercial corridor since a revival began in 2009, per Visit New Orleans, which now counts more than 32 restaurants, bars and shops along the eight blocks between Jefferson and Napoleon avenues. Lower Coast courted students directly last August with a 10% discount for those showing valid ID during fall move-in week, according to a post on the company's Facebook page.
Beyond Coffee: Mocktails, Kava and Collaborations
Once the Freret Street location is established, Lower Coast hopes to introduce a small food menu that could include sandwiches and paninis, the Hullabaloo reports. The drink list may stretch beyond espresso too, with the owners proposing additions like Dram botanical sparkling water, ginger-lemon shots, kava, mushroom beverages and other mocktail-style drinks.
Those later-day ambitions echo what the roaster already sells out of its Magazine Street storefront: a traditional Coffee & Chicory blend, according to Lower Coast Coffee. The owners also hope to build collaborations with fellow Freret Street businesses Good Bird, Dat Dog and Sunnies, with an eye toward making the new cafe a genuine gathering place in the neighborhood, per the Hullabaloo.
Joining a Corridor in Transition
Lower Coast's arrival comes as Freret Street keeps reshuffling its storefronts. Dat Dog, the hot dog shop that began in 2011 as a 475-square-foot hot dog shack on Freret Street before later moving across the street into a renovated gas station just steps from Lower Coast's new address, closed in May for a $508,000 exterior renovation, as Hoodline previously reported on the overhaul.
For Lower Coast, the bet is that Freret Street has room for an all-day coffee bar with a stage it didn't have to build.
