Troy Hill’s Pear & The Pickle combines a coffee shop with sandwiches and a small general store

The concept for Pear & The Pickle, the new Troy Hill eatery from Alexis Tragos and Bobby Stockard, is simple: a neighborhood coffee shop with a general-store vibe, stocked with a modest selection of household groceries like dish soap, olive oil and Cheerios.

But Tragos and Stockard, who are married with twin boys born just a week before the café opened, are all about letting their customers tell them what Pear & The Pickle should be, and not the other way around.

“I thought we were going to be a coffee shop with breakfast sandwiches. It turns out we’re a sandwich shop that has coffee,” says Stockard. “The people have told us that we’re a sandwich shop.”

Housed in a former antique shop — and decorated with some of its former stock — the café specializes in simple, unfancy fare: no molecular gastronomy, nothing deconstructed. Their fan-favorite bacon, egg and cheese sandwich is what Tragos calls “bodega-style,” meaning its ingredients and name are pretty much the same. No nonsense, and very tasty. 

For Tragos and Stockard, their effort is best spent listening to and providing for the needs of the neighborhood, whether that’s Wi-Fi for young professionals, ice cream for local kids or the rooftop garden they’re hoping to have finished this summer.

“We wanted to do something for the neighborhood,” says Tragos. “We wanted to bring it back to what corner markets used to be.”

This article appears in Jun 22-28, 2016.