Pop Star: Amy Enrico

The weather outside is frightful, blizzard enough to warm a cross-country skier’s heart. But inside the cappuccino’s so delightful. So why wouldn’t Tazza D’Oro’s Amy Enrico just let it snow?

More than just another place to cop a cup o’ joe, Tazza D’Oro (gold cup in Italian) is a de facto community center for woodsy Highland Park, and the city.

“We’ve become amazingly successful,” Enrico says, “due to the community groups that meet here. That was the crux of the business plan, to have a real Old World-style coffee house, a place where the community gathers, to talk, to plan. That’s what coffee shops have been, breeding grounds for change.”

Well, sure, but in the present case there’s also Tazza D’s deep, rich coffee, brewed with top-of-the-mark Batdorf & Bronson beans, Fed-Exed from Olympia, WA. And the splendidly calorific pastries – baklava and brownies, panini and pound cake – from the family bakery in Jeannette. There’s the gifted, genteel staff, 10 loyalists who treat Tazza D as if it were their business, not Enrico’s. And there’s the ambience – warm, intimate, European, topped with original art on the walls. In fact, Tazza D’s such a popular place to hang that wall space is booked through April. 2008.

Fifteen years ago, Enrico, who doubles as a full-time business enterprise coordinator for nearby East Liberty Development (EDLI), helping others grow small businesses in that battered part of the city, had been just another coffee cretin until business took her to coffee-rich Seattle. Sittin’ ‘n’ sippin,’ she realized that “the coffee shops out there made people culturally connected. Highland Park didn’t have that.” Sure, she hung at the Southside Beehive, but felt out of place. “It wasn’t my neighborhood,” she recalls. So she set about remedying things in Highland Park.

Coming from a family of small business owners, Enrico says, gave her all the right moves. “It was in my blood to own my own business,” she says.

Walking her dog nine years ago she noticed a for sale sign at 1125 North Highland. Kismet! Within a week, she had a sales agreement. A year’s worth of roaster searching (“I tend to be passionate about the intricacies of coffee,” she says) and sweat equity later, Tazza D opened, June, ’99.

With her community now stretching far beyond Highland Park -- regulars come from Squirrel Hill and Shadyside, Friendship and Fox Chapel -- Tazza D “has become a destination,” Enrico says. Take Conversation Café for Women, for instance. Meeting monthly, some 90 women come “to unmask themselves,” Enrico says. “To be more prominent. To change the world.”

There’s Team Caffeine, and her sister Team Decaf, sets of 30 bicyclers who do longer, faster, or shorter, slower, depending. There are the poets who come to read. Writing dissertations, having mail forwarded, dropping off kids, “people do their lives here,” Enrico says.

“This place has changed me more than anything,” she adds. “I’ve made amazing friends. For me, that’s all that matters. I’m the luckiest owner in the world.”

Award-winning writer Abby Mendelson is the author of numerous books, including The Pittsburgh Steelers Official History and Pittsburgh: A Place in Time. Ghost Dancer, a collection of short stories, is available at amazon and bn.com.