The Beehive Cafe

Founded in July 2007 by Jen Cavallaro on Franklin Street overlooking Bristol Harbor, The Beehive Cafe opened as a bakery -- bread, pastries, and coffee -- with breakfast and then a full lunch menu added as the operation grew, and weekend dinners joining by 2010. New Harvest Coffee Roasters supplies the espresso and drip program, and the kitchen sources ingredients locally where it can, a habit built into daily operations for a small Rhode Island harbor town rather than a marketing point. The Beehive Pantry, a companion venture selling packaged bread and pastries, grew directly out of that same baking operation rather than as a separate later concept. Ownership has since passed from the Cavallaro family to John, Sherry, and Emily Scott -- Emily had worked at the cafe for years beforehand and took on day-to-day operations with an explicit intent to keep the menu and atmosphere unchanged rather than reposition the business. Nearly two decades on, The Beehive Cafe still runs on the premise it opened with: a working waterfront bakery that built its menu outward meal by meal, season by season, instead of launching fully formed.