Coffee Waves

David Bendett didn't grow up a coffee drinker — he discovered the trade at 33 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when a friend introduced him to a specialty shop called Nordaggio's and he found himself drawn less to the espresso than to the way the shop pulled a neighborhood together over an afternoon macchiato. When he moved to Corpus Christi in 2006 he found a city with no specialty coffee shops at all, let alone one built as a hangout; after running a coffee cart for a few years, he opened the first Coffee Waves storefront in 2008, followed by a Port Aransas location in 2010 when an old dress shop came vacant. The gelato side of the business came from formal training: Bendett studied at a gelato school in Baltimore under a small family-owned Italian company before bringing the technique home, and Coffee Waves' Corpus Christi shops are now known locally for house-made Italian gelato and sorbetto alongside the coffee. Beans are still roasted weekly by Nordaggio's, the same specialty roaster that first hooked Bendett in Tulsa, closing the loop between where his interest in coffee started and where he built a business on it. With his wife Amber, the company has since grown to seven locations across Corpus Christi and Port Aransas, pairing espresso and gelato with deli paninis and frozen drinks.