Food & Dining
Mountain Grounds Coffee & Tea Co.: The Coffee Stop Already on Your Route
Our favorite coffee in the area, and an easy stop if your grocery run takes you to Lowes Foods. It also has a children's area and a changing table, which are worth knowing about before a morning out with young children.
Most of the travel guide is researched rather than lived, and each article says so at the top. This one is like the Puerto Nuevo write-up: we go here.
Mountain Grounds Coffee & Tea Co. is our favorite coffee in the area. What makes it worth an article rather than a passing mention is that if Lowes Foods is your grocery stop, it adds no separate detour.
It is on the Lowes Foods corner
The cafe sits on NC-105 in Banner Elk, at the intersection of Tynecastle and NC-105, in front of Lowes Foods.
That is the same Lowes Foods our restaurants and groceries guide names as one of the two full grocery stores at the foot of the mountain, and the same one our arrival-day routine stops at. If that is where you are stocking the house, you are coming to this corner anyway. Banner Elk is about fifteen minutes from the house under normal conditions, so the coffee is not a trip. It is a stop.
The listings place it at the base of Grandfather Mountain. That is orientation rather than a suggestion: the mountain is simply what this stretch of road sits below, and it is a different thing again from Grandfather Mountain State Park, which is a hiking destination and not this.
What they actually make
It is independently owned and operated by a husband and wife.
The coffee comes from local roasters. The cafe lite bites are made in house.
The pastries are the part worth reading twice if anyone in your group eats around a restriction: the gluten free, dairy free and vegan pastries are sourced from a bakery in Black Mountain, North Carolina. With a group this size, that is worth knowing before breakfast rather than discovering at the counter.
For breakfast there are bagel sandwiches, breakfast burritos and croissant sandwiches.
They have actually thought about children
Roughly half the groups who book this house arrive with children, so this is worth naming plainly rather than burying in a list of amenities.
The shop has a children’s area and a changing table.
A changing table in particular can save a trip back to the house, and it is not something you can tell from the outside or from a photograph.
There is also a fireplace, a range of seating and free WiFi, which together make it a place you can sit for a while rather than one you pass through. If the weather has canceled a plan and nobody has a better idea yet, that combination is more useful than it sounds.
Our take
We are not scoring or ranking it. This is a recommendation.
The croissant sandwiches are excellent. That is the specific thing we would tell a friend, and it is the whole of our opinion rather than a summary of a longer one.
What we have not put in this article
No opening hours, no opening days, no prices, and no rating or ranking from any review site. Trading patterns here move with the season, as they do across the area’s dining scene.
Check with the shop directly for anything current, and if you are planning the grocery run around it, our restaurants and groceries guide has the rest of that errand.
