Cafe has real Charisma

Story by Amy Blanton
LocalShops1.com USF-St Pete contributor

Tucked in the art district of the Village of the Arts in Bradenton is a coffee & art shop. Walk toward the bright, spring- color painted structure and something draws you in. Maybe it’s the iron archway, maybe it’s the glass windows … but there’s something magnetic about Charisma Cafe and Art.
Kim and Harvey Hoffman opened the shop in October 2007. The couple had moved to Sarasota from Boston more than 20 years before, never with an intention to open a coffee shop. So how did it come about? Kim Hoffman tells us her story.
“I’ve been serving coffee since I was 12. I’ve worked at bakeries, doughnut shops, coffee shops, as well as my sister’s coffee shop in Sarasota for 12 years,” Hoffman says. But opening her own shop was never in the plans. Hoffman was actually out looking for an investment property.
“Our family doesn’t have a lot of funds because my husband is paralyzed, (but) we had equity in the house and the bank was able to loan us the money. The idea was to have a family come in and rent the house for five years or so at a time and then later give it to our kids.

Kim Hoffman, Charisma Cafe

“I didn’t know about the Village of the Arts until my realtor friend, Jonie, from Sarasota brought me here,” she says. “We were shown a piece of property that was very promising and we put a back-up bid on it.”
On the way back to Sarasota, the realtor drove by a house she had sold a year earlier.
“An eerie feeling overcame me when the car stopped,” Hoffman says. “I saw the place and said, ‘I hope that’s not the place that you wanted to show me.’ There were citations posted, parts of the chimney were knocked off.”
The realtor called the next day. Turns out the house they had seen, the one falling apart, was for sale. The owner had called the night before and aid he was dying and needed to sell the house.
Hoffman said she wanted the house. The night before she had prayed for a sign, for something to send her in the direction she was meant to go. She figured this was it. She asked the realtor to write the contract. She refused to even go look at the house from the inside.
“We signed the papers at Sarasota Memorial Hospital because (the seller) was going in to surgery and they didn’t think he would make it,” Hoffman says.
“In a sense, I did a bad thing of not looking at the house first. There was practically no floor. In the back, it wasn’t complete. Half of the back wall was gone.”
For the next few months, Hoffman worked on the house. She wasn’t even close to done when, one day, she was driving around the Village of the Arts with an artist friend.  “I told her ‘I bet in about a year or so someone is going to open a coffee shop here.’ She turned to me and said, ‘And why can’t that be you?’ A few moments later she says, ‘We do know how much you love food.’”
They talked about the house. Hoffman said she knew it still looked bad, but after she painted it would be better. “It just has some charisma,” she told her friend.
“That’s your name,” her friend said. “Charisma.”
And in that short conversation the Hoffmans’ property went from being a rental home to a coffee shop/gallery. She didn’t tell her husband until months later, after the business was created, the supplies had been purchased.
At the time, the Village of the Arts was a transitional neighborhood, an up-and-coming arts district. Today, it is a thriving community filled with colorful homes, art galleries, restaurants and other businesses.
And the coffee shop is packed with charisma. Besides the coffee and food and local artwork, it’s also a place for tea parties, for children and grown-ups, too.

Tags: bradenton, charisma cafe, coffee shop, village of the arts