A new coffee shop will soon be coming to Dillwyn.

Radha Metro-Midkiff, a lover of coffee and Buckingham local, plans to open a new business, Corner Coffee Junction, on Main Street in Dillwyn.

Metro-Midkiff stated that the idea for bringing a coffee shop to the local community started when she met her now husband, Dick Midkiff.

“He wasn’t a big coffee drinker like I was. We started really going to coffee shops, and he is a basketball official, so we travel all over Virginia and North Carolina going to his games. He would sort of look at coffee shops everywhere we went. He just kind of got this idea in his head that it would be really fun to open a coffee shop.”

“When the old Davis Department Store came up for sale, we went and looked at it and I was like, ‘This would be my dream, to remodel this place’,” Metro-Midkiff added.

“We don’t really have a place right now where people can just gather and sit and talk,” she stated. “So that was kind of our first inspiration — offering something back to the community that would allow them to have a space. Sometimes I want to go out with a friend and I want to meet up with them, but we don’t necessarily want to go out to have dinner or something.”

Metro-Midkiff also stated that she hopes to bring local art, video game nights and travelling theater to Corner Coffee Junction.

And it’s not just coffee that customers will be able to enjoy at the new Main Street business. Metro-Midkiff said that she hopes to provide the community with healthy food options, including dairy-free, gluten-free, and possibly grain-free dishes. She added that Corner Coffee Junction plans to offer a pie-themed menu, including sweet and savory pies that will be both traditional and non-traditional. The establishment will also serve gelato.

In addition, the coffee shop will do its best to be eco-friendly and reduce their use of plastics.

“We’re so proud of our land and so proud of our rural living out here, so really trying to honor that I think is really important,” Metro-Midkiff said.

Metro-Midkiff and her husband originally hoped to open Corner Coffee Junction in the fall of 2018, but experienced a setback in construction and bringing the old building up to code. The couple hope to now open the coffee shop at the beginning of November, but have a special event planned for Halloween.

“We have just confirmed today that we are going to be teaming up with Mama Crockett’s Cider Donuts, which is a food truck from Lynchburg,” Metro-Midkiff stated in an interview with The Herald Tuesday, Oct. 15. “We’re going to have donuts and hot apple cider at the coffee shop on Halloween.”

Metro-Midkiff added that free donuts will be given away to the first 400 people at the event, and although the actual coffee shop will not be open Oct. 31, she hopes to give residents a glimpse of the new business.

Metro-Midkiff hopes that the opening of the coffee shop will help to bring more appreciation to the county.

“I always say that I think it’s important to get people out of their cars and walking on the street, because you don’t care when you’re just driving through a place,” Metro-Midkiff said. “I feel like with Dillwyn now, people are always just driving through, but if you stand on the patio that we’ve created and you look back toward the Buckingham Branch Railroad and that one little block of Dillwyn with the little clock, for me it is as charming as anything that you’re going to find anywhere in America. And we have it right here in Dillwyn. So I’m hoping that Corner Coffee Junction will not only serve the community, but will also help bring in people from other areas and help them realize all the cool stuff that we have going on in our county.”