Family legacy finds a new home at Coeur d’Alene’s Coral Cafe

Danny Griffin hopes customers are strangers only once.

When someone walks through the doors of Coral Cafe on Sherman Avenue for the first time, he wants them to leave feeling less like they visited a restaurant and more like they spent the morning at a family member’s house.

For Griffin, those values began long before the opening of the cafe on June 10 in Coeur d’Alene.

The new breakfast and lunch restaurant is named after a neighborhood staple in Burbank, California, opened by Griffin’s grandparents, Dan and Irene Frydrychowski, in 1957. They operated the restaurant for 33 years before selling it in 1990.

“They were all about hospitality, bringing family and friends together and making it more of an experience instead of just a transaction,” Griffin said. “It’s important to me to get to know all the faces that come in.”

Although the menu in Coeur d’Alene bears little resemblance to the original, Griffin said the restaurant was never intended to re-create his grandparents’ Coral Cafe. Instead, he wanted to carry forward the culture that made it meaningful.

“I have fond memories of my grandparents always cooking in the kitchen,” Griffin said. “My grandparents loved cooking. They’re not around anymore, but I just wanted to do kind of a tribute to them and how they inspired me to follow my dreams.”

That dream took much longer to realize than Griffin expected.

Griffin moved to North Idaho as a child. In 2005, he took an entry-level job washing dishes at Cedars Floating Restaurant in Coeur d’Alene. Over the next two decades, he worked nearly every position imaginable, moving from dishwashing to food preparation, salad bar, busing tables and eventually restaurant management.

After six years managing Belle’s Brunch House in Hayden, Idaho, Griffin and his family decided it was time to open a restaurant of their own.

Griffin considered several spaces before Schmidty’s Burgers on Sherman Avenue closed earlier this year. During a family barbecue, he mentioned the vacant building would make a good restaurant.

His brother-in-law happened to know the building’s owner.

“The next day me and the guy met up,” Griffin said. “From there it just kind of all took place.”

Griffin credits much of Coral Cafe’s personality to his wife, Celine, and her aunt, Sharon, who helped develop the restaurant’s distinctive look. Sharon traveled from Wisconsin to paint the interior.

The finished space hardly resembles the restaurant that previously occupied it.

Instead of dark finishes, Coral Cafe displays bright coral-colored walls accented with forest-green booths, tropical designs featuring palm trees and flamingos, white tabletops and hand-painted botanical designs. An artificial green wall bearing an LED sign with the restaurant’s name serves as a changing display that Griffin plans to decorate with seasonal themes.

“We have gray season around here in January, February, March,” Griffin said. “I want to have something that takes you out of that when you walk in. It’s just something that brings you up and makes you feel good.”

While the restaurant’s appearance is new, Griffin believes the atmosphere matters far more than the décor.

He describes Coral Cafe as welcoming, family-oriented and affordable – a place where regular customers can come in several times each week without feeling like dining out is a luxury.

“I only want you to feel like you’re a stranger once,” Griffin said. “Then you’re part of the family.”

That philosophy extends to the staff as well.

Many restaurants naturally separate front-of-house employees from the kitchen, Griffin said. At Coral Cafe, he wanted everyone working toward the same goal.

“It feels like we’re all just one staff,” Griffin said. “We work together really well.”

The restaurant employs 19 people, including one with a direct connection to the original Coral Cafe.

Griffin’s uncle, Danny, started working at the Burbank restaurant when he was just 10 years old. Now 70, he came out of retirement to help cook.

“It really took a whole village to put it all together,” Griffin said.

One person Griffin knew had to be part of that village was Andy Coleman.

Over 20 years ago, the two met when Griffin was hired as a dishwasher at Cedars Floating Restaurant in Coeur d’Alene, where Coleman worked for 27 years.

Even then, Griffin remembers telling Coleman that someday he wanted to open a restaurant of his own.

“I said, ‘Hey, someday when I open a restaurant, are you going to come with me?’ ”

About eight months ago, Griffin called with a real plan. Coleman didn’t hesitate.

For Coleman, joining Coral Cafe was an incredible opportunity to lead the kitchen at a new restaurant.

Born and raised in Coeur d’Alene, Coleman entered the restaurant industry at age 15, starting as a dishwasher at Cedars Floating Restaurant. Over the next 35 years, he worked his way through nearly every position in the kitchen, eventually becoming a sous chef before spending time at several other restaurants.

“We were talking about this 20 years ago, and now it’s finally happening,” Coleman said. “I’m just honored that he asked me to help him out.”

The reunion brought Coleman back together with his brother, Matt, whom Coleman says he had not worked with in 10 years. Matt serves as Coral Cafe’s sous chef.

Coleman and Griffin both reiterated the simple philosophy that Coral Cafe is built on: make as much food from scratch as possible while creating the kind of guest experience they remember growing up with.

“We both have had kind of the same idea of what we wanted to do,” Coleman said. “That’s just to provide the best customer service and guest experience by providing the freshest ingredients and trying to make all scratch-made food.”

Although Griffin and Coleman built much of their careers preparing dinner service, Coral Cafe gave them an opportunity to tackle something new.

“Breakfast is something I’ve never done before,” Coleman said. “It gave me an opportunity to learn a new set of skills.”

Instead of relying heavily on prepackaged products, the kitchen prepares all five salad dressings in-house. The restaurant has a baker who prepares fresh-baked biscuits, cinnamon rolls, monkey bread and lemon poppy seed cake. Even the fryer uses beef tallow, a choice Griffin said reflects the team’s desire to emphasize healthier and higher-quality ingredients whenever possible.

The menu itself has a plethora of breakfast options, including biscuits and gravy, pancakes, French toast, breakfast skillets, fresh salads, breakfast sandwiches and a carnivore platter, to name a few.

Griffin said the biscuits and gravy have quickly become one of the restaurant’s most popular dishes.

“People have it and they’re like, ‘This is the best in town,’ ” he said.

Coleman has his own favorite.

“I kind of like the skillet dish that we have with the sausage, potatoes, onions, peppers and eggs on top,” he said. “I’ve always been one of those skillet guys.”

The emphasis isn’t necessarily on reinventing breakfast.

“You can only go so different on breakfast and lunch,” Griffin said.

Instead, the restaurant focuses on the little things, like using linen napkins instead of paper, serving drinks in glassware and preparing food by hand.

“It’s a lot more hands-on,” he said. “You can just taste the difference.”

For Coleman and his brother, there is a nostalgic connection between the food and the restaurant’s mission. Both of his grandmothers lived only a few blocks from Coral Cafe’s current location.

“It feels like coming back to my grandparents’ house,” Coleman said. “Those memories pop into our heads. We’re just happy to kind of carry on that tradition of guest service.”

Despite the demands of breakfast service, Coleman described the kitchen as calm, collaborative and free of the yelling that follows restaurant stereotypes.

“We’re real laid back,” he said. “Even if it is stressful, we just focus on the task at hand. Everybody helps out wherever they can. If somebody needs help with something, everybody’s quick to jump in. It’s got that real team-first mentality.”

Griffin makes a point of stopping at nearly every table. Rather than asking whether guests enjoyed their meals, he uses conversations to learn what could be improved.

“I really like to go around and check on every table,” Griffin said. “I appreciate that they’re giving me feedback or constructive criticism on how we can get better.”

That willingness to listen is part of honoring the legacy his grandparents left behind.

Looking ahead, Griffin hopes Coral Cafe becomes more than another breakfast stop on Sherman Avenue.

He wants it to become a restaurant where grandparents bring grandchildren, where neighbors gather over coffee and where visitors feel welcome alongside regulars.

The restaurant has begun including free coffee with an entrée purchase before 7 a.m. and offers 10% discounts for veterans and first responders.

“Four or five years from now,” Griffin said, “I hope it’s just a family staple restaurant. Somewhere they feel they can come on a regular basis that won’t break the bank, that they just enjoy coming to and they feel like family coming in.”