Cornerstone is heading into Sheffield city centre, with brothers Richard and Michael Massarella preparing to open a new coffee shop on Pinstone Street this winter.
The new site will take over the former Toni & Guy unit on the recently pedestrianised street, opposite the Peace Gardens and right in the middle of the ongoing city centre changes. It will be Cornerstone’s third site, joining its venues at Dyson Place and The Hive at Yorkshire Wildlife Park.
While Dyson Place is best-known as a sit-down restaurant/bar, the Pinstone Street opening will be a dedicated café space. The focus will be on speciality coffee, freshly made food and a big counter loaded with cakes and pastries – somewhere that works just as well for grabbing something on the move as it does for sitting in.
Coffee will come from Yorkshire-based North Star Coffee Roasters, while the food offer will include focaccia sandwiches and salads made fresh that morning. Richard and Michael also plan to bring in bakes from independent producers around Sheffield alongside brownies, cookies and other bits made in-house. Longer term, they’re looking at developing their own bakery operation.
The pair have spent plenty of time around Italian coffee culture – their family is originally from Italy, with their mum’s side hailing from Sardinia – and some of that influence will make its way into the new place.
“We love that type of café culture,” says Richard. “Bustling streets and social spaces where you can grab your coffee or a fresh pastry and go. I think that’s why we’ve put the hatch in, so you get a bit of an element of that.”
That aforementioned hatch will form part of a new-look frontage, allowing takeaway service directly from the window. A large food display will also be visible from the street, with Richard and Michael hoping to tempt in people passing through the increasingly high footfall area.
Studio Jim is handling the interior, with plans for light oak, sage green gloss tiles, mustard banquettes and globe lighting. There’ll be some outside seating too, a prime spot overlooking the Peace Gardens and Town Hall.
The brothers have also applied for an alcohol licence, although they’re clear that this isn’t Cornerstone branching out into bar territory.
“We might just do a couple of spritz, you know, a red and a white, more for the summer months,” Richard says. Michael quickly adds: “We don’t want this to be a bar, though. This is a café spot first and foremost.”
However, they say that a licence will give them the option to experiment with occasional bistro evenings, collaborations and pop-ups once the café has found its feet.
It comes five years after Cornerstone opened at Dyson Place. After a quick period of expansion during the business’s first couple of years, Michael says they deliberately slowed things down to make sure standards at the existing sites didn’t slip.
“We didn’t want to go too far, too fast and forget about what we’ve got,” he says. “I think we needed to have that break to make sure we kept consistent, kept the quality and kept the standards in the existing sites before we could expand.
“We’ve got that solid base now where we can look at other opportunities, and it’ll be great for us to have that Cornerstone presence here in the city centre.”
