| For the Athens Banner-Herald
Café Racer, the donut-biscuit-and-burger emporium in the Oglethorpe County town of Crawford, is on the move in more ways than one.
The drive-up restaurant on Arnoldsville Road celebrates its fourth birthday on April 27 and has a couple of new wrinkles planned that should happily feed even more folks in the coming year.
Chris Hart, who owns and operates Café Racer with his wife Gabriella, announced last fall that a new edition of the restaurant would be constructed on West Broad Street in Athens, between ABC Package and the Classic City Bank. Since that time, Hart decided to get into the food truck business as well.
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“We get a lot of catering requests, but beside the comic implications of running our business (without) mobile opportunities, we’re sick and tired of saying no in the meantime to weddings and UGA events and things like that,” said Hart. “We’ve probably turned down more catering than we’ve said yes to in the last year.”
The Athens branch of Café Racer is set to open in July and the food truck is expected to be rolling by mid-summer, Hart said.
“The new spot keeps getting pushed back,” he said. “We’re doing what we can do, but if it’s not one thing, it’s the next. Right now we’re having trouble sourcing certain electrical components for our building. Crazy stuff like that — post-COVID sourcing, that sort of stuff.”
Establishing a food truck will not only enable Café Racer to dive deeper into catering but it will also give the aging building in Crawford time for infrastructure improvements.
“When that building in Crawford was born, it didn’t know the volume we were going to be putting through it and it definitely didn’t know it was going to be for four years,” said Hart. “Part of the reason we’re pushing (the truck) ahead of the new building on Broad is we want to give Crawford a little bit of a break to do some repairs and renovations there and get it where we want it.
“Our short-term goal is to get the food truck up and running and run it out at the (Crawford) property so people will come to the food truck instead while we work on the main building. And in a perfect world, maybe the building will be retired and will instead become like a base for the food truck.”
Opening in 2018 and serving as a go-to stop for breakfast and burgers, Café Racer has enjoyed steady business from the beginning but got a nice shot in the arm last September when ESPN broadcaster Todd Blackledge — on assignment covering the Georgia-South Carolina football game — spotlighted the restaurant in his revived “Todd’s Taste of the Town” feature during the game.
Hart said that while 2022 got off to a bit of sluggish start, Café Racer has been racing to fill orders since February.
“I was joking with my buddy the other day and told him I need to keep a journal of every month of every year because every January, during the first three weeks, I’m like, ‘Man, we’re not cool anymore. Nobody likes us anymore.’” He said. “But people take time to transition back. We had a super-slow start, but it sounds like it was like that for everybody in town. February is a shorter month, but pound-for-pound, day-for-day, it was like our best month of all time. We’ve been very busy and we’re expecting to roll through the spring.”
Although there’s certainly a lot going on at the present time for Café Racer, Hart said he’s confident everything will eventually sort itself out.
“We’re really excited for this next step,” he said. “We’re shooting for the stars with it and putting it all out there. There are times I feel nervous about it, but at the end of the day, most people opening places are going to put a lot of money into some concept and hope people like the food. We already know. We have a solid, super-loyal customer base, so it’s a unique situation for us to build from that platform.”
For more information, visit www.caferacer78.com.