Satsuma Cafe Is Opening a New Location in the Lower Garden District

Stylish breakfast and lunch cafe, Satsuma, will soon bring its fresh-pressed juices and leafy greens to the Lower Garden District when it opens its third location in the new Framework building (1320 Magazine Street) in the spring of 2019.

“Since 2015, we’ve been on a quest for the third Satsuma. We turned the city upside down looking,” Satsuma co-owner Cassi Dymond told Eater New Orleans.

At the beginning, one of the biggest challenges to finding a new spot was the amount of kitchen space needed. Satsuma makes everything from scratch, so forty percent of any one of its cafes would need to be used as prep space, Cassi Dymond said.

To solve that issue, she and co-owner Peter Dymond turned the back of the Bywater Satsuma into a “commissary kitchen,” allowing them to produce a lot the three restaurants’ food in one kitchen, thus creating uniformity across the restaurants and — importantly — shrinking the footprint of the kitchen at the other locations.

Courtesy studioWTA

Working with a design team from studioWTA with Julie Babin as architect and Daniel Kautz as project manager, they are planning a more modern, less rustic look for the LGD eatery with walnut, tile, concrete, lots of live plants, and large windows flooding the space with natural light. There are 101 seats — 44 inside and 57 in a courtyard.

“It’s a modern vibe combined with a French cafe, with fluid space inside and out. Because we get to design from scratch, we get to make a lot of decisions. We never got to do that before,” Cassi Dymond said. Their first Satsuma opened in the Bywater in 2009 where a coffee shop used to be. The Maple Street Satsuma, opened in 2012, also took over a former coffee shop, but this one that had once been a laundry mat and a gym.

Courtesy studioWTA

The Framework building, developed by Felicity Properties, will also house the Krewe Eyewear headquarters and a new wine bar from Bar Frances and Tujague’s owner Mark Latter.

Both Satsuma and the wine bar are in the rear of the building, each with a courtyard. A “promenade” or central arcade leads to the rear of the building with the wine bar on one corner and Satsuma on the other.

The Dymonds would like to continue expanding Satsuma, one cafe at a time, now that they’ve laid the foundation of the commissary, standardized recipes, and made the big (and expensive) decision to switch to cold-pressed, organic juices squeezed from a $25,000 machine — all changes that they hope will help maintain quality at all their restaurants. “We didn’t cut corners: We stand behind our products,” Cassi Dymond said.

Courtesy studioWTA

The “same people will be working behind the scenes” and the Dymonds are pulling management from existing locations, they say. Both owners will be at the LGD spot for at least the first six months to ensure a smooth opening.

The LGD Satsuma will keep the same menu and hours, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, as the Uptown and Bywater locations.

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