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Chocolate chip cookie dough pancakes.
Rice Krispies-crusted French toast with strawberry Nutella.
Chicken apple sausage omelettes with roasted red peppers and smoked gouda cheese.
That’s just a taste of Toast Coffeehouse, whose owners are hoping to open up in downtown Patchogue as early as next month. They signed a lease in January and started construction inside a former consignment shop on East Main Street a couple months later.
At 4,000 square feet, the Patchogue space is twice the size of the Toast Coffeehouse in Port Jefferson.
Toast is a breakfast and lunch spot with an artsy, coffeehouse-style vibe, said Terence Scarlatos, who started the business with his wife, Jennifer.
But the Patchogue location will have its own look and feel to it.
“We’re going with a steampunk theme for this place, which goes back to the 1890s with the steam turbines,” he said. “It was really a creative period, with Nikola Tesla and some of those characters. It also reminded me of Patchogue with the pipes and the gears. I wanted to give a tip of the hat to the turn of the century.”
To do so, Scarlatos has recruited artist friends to design and build century-old looking fixtures. He recently had the newly installed air ducts painted to make them look as if they’re from another era.
He’s also installing what he calls a steampunk time machine using an old barber’s chair and other adornments. There, diners could take photographs of one another in a 19th century-looking backdrop.
Toast Coffeehouse in Patchogue will be able to seat 85 people at once, with another 20 or so in a back courtyard it shares with the library.
“We’ll have accordion doors opening right to the patio,” Scarlatos said.
The Ronkonkoma native said he’s romanticized about American coffeehouses ever since spending time on the West Coast in the 1990s.
“I traveled for about nine years, I moved to Seattle and then down the coast to Oregon, California, working in restaurants as a cook,” he said. “One of the greatest things about these different places was the coffeehouses, where you could go and have breakfast and meet up with people. Within a couple hours you could find out what was going on that night, what party to go to. It was just something I really took to.”
In 2002 he and his wife, who’s stepped back from the business a bit to help with their kids, took the concept to Port Jefferson.
They started looking for a second spot about three years ago, and after coming close to settling in Bellport Village, ended up in Patchogue Village, which they like since it’s easily accessible from points east, west and north.
“Port Jefferson is a bit more isolated and harder to get to,” he said.
They’re predicting a September opening for Toast Patchogue.
“We had anticipated opening up in the summer,” he said. “But it looks like we’ll catch the tail end.”
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Photo: Terence Scarlatos at the Toast Coffeehouse building in Patchogue Tuesday. Some of the walls are being painted so that they look like century-old concrete. (Credit: Michael White)
