PHOTOGRAPH PROVIDED BY GARIN PIRNIA
According to Hana Chu, boredom is what inspired the creation of KungBrew Café, the latest offering from the owners of the kitschy Chinese food favorite AmerAsia.
“I got bored at the restaurant and I needed another project,” she says. “We’ve got two toddlers, but still I was itching to do something else. This place came on the market. I’m like, ‘Oh, perfect. I don’t think I’d open a coffee shop anywhere else but Covington.’”
Chu and her husband, Johnny, are opening the Asian-inspired coffee and tea house in MainStrasse Village next month.
“I know what Covington people like, and people in Covington, especially MainStrasse, they like quirky,” Hana explains. “They like something a little bit offbeat. They don’t want something generic and overpriced. They want something that’s welcoming and warm.”
The three-floor building used to be Bean Haus Bakery & Café and before that Groove Coffee House. For 15 years, Johnny has collected Asian antiques, so he finally found a place to display some it. Soothing green walls, murals, and a fish-scale inspired design for the espresso bar accent the artwork. The second floor offers a room for gongfu, a traditional Chinese tea service.
“It’s kind of messy,” Hana says of the tea service. “You got a lot of water being poured everywhere. The difference is you use a lot of leaf to less water and faster infusions. Everybody gathers around drinking tea.”
She wants to offer community-oriented events, including mahjong upstairs for Johnny’s father. “I just want to create a calm space,” she adds. “You can stay and sit for a while.”
Unlike other Covington coffee shops, KungBrew Café contains a more commodious environment. Customers can grab coffee and tea to-go from the first floor, or stay to hang out.
“We want to create an environment here where people can feel comfortable,” Hana says. “They can get a $5 coffee and then stay for a little bit and it’s okay. They’re not going to be rushed out.”
The menu will consist of limited bubble tea made from fresh ingredients, not powders. They’ll have some pastries and possibly hot food from AmeriAsia. The coffee menu will feature basic Urbana Café espresso-based drinks like lattes and cappuccinos.
Some of the tea will be imported from Johnny’s uncle’s tea farm in Taiwan. His uncle also oversees all tea import and exports, which are all-natural, pesticide free, and harvested and roasted by hand.
“Any tea that goes out of Taiwan, it’s all legit,” Johnny says. “One worst thing that you can get nowadays in the market is you don’t know the origin of the tea, so you don’t know if there’s any additives in the tea or not.”
Johnny immigrated to Cincinnati from Taipei, Taiwan, when he was 11 years old. Whenever he got lost, he just happened to find himself in front of the building that became AmerAsia in 2008.
“I was always aware of Covington, and then one day my dad called me up and tells me that there’s a restaurant for sale,” Johnny says. “He came down here. It was that restaurant. We’ve been in Covington ever since. We’re not going anywhere else. We don’t want to go to Ohio. We want to stay where we are.”
Despite the constant changes, Covington remains welcome to smaller businesses. “We have so many mom-and-pop restaurants and bars versus all the restaurant groups that you have in OTR,” Johnny says. “We want to be part of this organic community.”
A business needs to make money in order to survive, but Hana and Johnny approach it as more of a hobby than making a large profit.
“It started with what we wanted to preach to the locals that Chinese food isn’t always sloppy,” Johnny says. “Money will come along.”
“I feel like you can’t be in the restaurant industry unless you actually get some level of joy from it,” Hana says. “When you remove that level of joy, everybody can feel it walking into your establishment, how cold it becomes and how corporate it becomes.”
The Chus love what they do, and you can feel that level of passion every time you’re in one of their businesses.
“We try to bring all this new experimenting,” Johnny says. “We’re doing some quirky things, so we’re going to be the first ones. We’re borrowing the same energy to see if it works here. If it works here, that’s great. How else can we make this more fun?”
KungBrew Café is located at 640 Main Street in Covington.
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