SteamPunk Cafe - Spotlight on Alberni

Hey this week on Spotlight on Alberni we’re on 3rd Avenue to talk to Carolanne about her business, SteamPunk Cafe.

Hey Carolanne, thanks for inviting us into your business. Tell us a little bit about yourself?

Well my name is Carolanne Zanette, I am a mom of 3 kids and 2 grandkids, and now 2 more little kids that we are raising. My husband and I bought the cafe a couple years ago. We both have grown up in Port Alberni, been here our whole lives and raised are kids here.

SteamPunk has been here for quite a few years. So Kevin Wright owned SteamPunk and I actually owned two stores on Argyle at the time and my daughter was the manager here. And Kevin was trying to sell it and he couldn’t sell it and he was sick and I thought, oh I don’t really want to have a coffee shop, but I could buy it and maybe my daughter could work there. So we bought it, and I sold my two stores, and then COVID happened, I lost my real job through COVID, So now I’m working in a cafe everyday!

We’d love to hear everything that you have going on here at SteamPunk Cafe.

So we do a lot of lunch catering, so offices and stuff will order lunches. We just sent out today 13 lunches to city hall. We have freezer meals, so you can come in and get homemade meals. Cabbage rolls seem to be our hit, but we have a wide variety in there as well, suits and senior sized meals.

We have retail which we didn’t have before, but I brought in retail. People seem to really like it. Everybody wants a coffee mug to go with their gift card. And then we have this great library space. So this is a literacy library and it’s a take-a-book, leave-a-book, or take-a-book and leave a donation and all of the proceeds go straight to Literacy Alberni. And it’s a great little reading lounge, you can come sit in here, read a book, enjoy a coffee. We have a shelf on the back that’s all board games and cards, and people can sit and play a game.

And then we also have our boardroom, and people can rent that, have board meetings. We have the big screen in there, they can hook their laptop up, and that’s’ also really great. We can cater in there. There’s so much going on in here, so much. They have great breakfasts, lunches, yea it’s awesome.

Last thing is tell us where you’re located and what your hours are.

We’re at 3035 3rd Avenue. Right now for summer our hours are Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 7:00 am - 4:00 pm. Wednesday nights, because of our Uptown Market for July and August, we’re open until 8:00pm. And then Sundays, we are open right now until 3:00pm, but starting in September we will be closing on Sundays, we don’t open Sundays during the winter. We just need family time!

Thanks for joining us on this weeks Spotlight on Alberni. If you own a local business and would like to be highlighted on a future episode of Spotlight on Alberni, contact us and TheFentonGroup.ca. We’ll see you next time.