Sisu Cafe Opening In Bay View
Coffee house, cafe and bakery with breakfast and lunch items, soups, salads.
The owners of Sabrosa Café and Gallery are opening a new cafe on S. Kinnickinnic Ave. that will cater to the morning commuters to and from Bay View.
Sisu Cafe, at 2121 S. Kinnickinnic Ave., will be a coffee house, cafe and bakery, with items priced to allow for customers to make visiting part of their daily routine, said Francisco Sanchez, who owns the business along with his partner John Ruben Piirainen. There will be outdoor seating, and french doors that will be installed to face Kinnickinnic Avenue and an awning.
Like Sabrosa, Sanchez said Sisu Cafe will continue a focus on fresh, farm-to-table ingredients.
“Sunday is gonna be special at Sisu,” Sanchez said. There will be a seated brunch service, with a slower pace of service and dining than the grab-and-go service planned for the rest of the week, he said.
The theme for the restaurant, Sanchez said, will be driven by Nordic and Finnish elements as an homage to his partner, Piirainen, who is Finnish. The cafe’s name, Sisu, is a Finnish word used to describe the determination and resilience that is held up as the national character of Finnish people. Sanchez said he picked the name, thinking “how appropriate for these times that we just went through.”
Another attraction for the location was all the development that has occurred at the north end of Bay View. Sisu will be right across the street from the KinetiK apartments, and Zillman Park, which is being redesigned as a new public space. Sanchez is on the committee reviewing the final designs for the park and he said it will become a plaza and community hub for Bay View.
Sanchez said he’s already cooking up a marketing strategy to encourage patrons to visit Sisu for a morning coffee, then head to the South Shore farmer’s market before “circling back to Sabrosa.”
Sanchez is planning to open the cafe sometime between late June and early July.