photo by: Mike Yoder

Louis Wigen-Toccalino owner of Decade Coffee and Espresso, 920 Delaware Street, pours hot water into an AeroPress to make a single cup of coffee. Coffee is steeped for between 10-50 seconds and then forced through a filter by pressing the plunger through the tube.

I don’t know how many glasses of chardonnay it will take to make The Kaw look like The Seine, but we may soon find out. An East Lawrence coffee shop has filed plans to convert itself into a French-style bistro, complete with alcohol.

Decade, the coffee shop at 920 Delaware St., has filed for a drinking establishment license, and city commissioners are scheduled to give the license its necessary approvals at tonight’s meeting.

Louis Wigen-Toccalino, owner of Decade, said the plan is to broaden the concept of the approximately one-year old coffee shop.

“The model is very much like a Parisian-style, French bistro where people come together to share conversation and ideas, and you do it around food and drink,” Wigen-Toccalino said. “We opened with coffee because that is the tone we wanted to establish.”

But Wigen-Toccalino said not everyone wants coffee at all hours of the day, so he’s seeking a liquor license so he can serve a selection of wines, beers and cordials. In addition, the coffee shop will expand its food menu. The shop already has started serving a sandwich menu for lunch — a fancy ham and cheese with white cheddar and pickled corn is one example — and plans to have an evening food menu as well. Wigen-Toccalino said in addition to sandwiches, the menu will include meat and cheese plates, a host of bar snacks, salads, and some steamed dishes or stew in the fall and winter.

Wigen-Toccalino said hours of the shop probably will be extended to 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. on most nights. But he said he doesn’t have plans to operate a traditional bar that stays open until the early morning hours.

“We want to stay a neighborhood establishment,” he said. “We want to keep the same atmosphere we have today.”

That’s probably been a key reason the proposal hasn’t yet run into neighborhood opposition. Another key point is that the establishment will have some regulations it will have to meet in regard to how much liquor it can sell. Scott McCullough, the city’s planning director, told me the property’s current zoning allows for a restaurant but not a bar use. The city defines a restaurant as one that makes at least 55 percent of its revenue from the sale of food rather than alcohol. Businesses that make more than 45 percent of their revenue from alcohol sales are considered bars or lounges, and they aren’t allowed in the limited industrial zoning district where Decade is located. So, bottom line, the city will have to monitor the sales tax and liquor tax receipts of Decade periodically to determine whether it is consistently meeting the minimum food sales requirement. (Coffee counts as food, is my understanding.)

City commissioners are dealing with a slightly different issue a little more than a block away. At Eighth and Pennsylvania streets, the developer of the Warehouse Arts District is seeking to open a bistro in a small building next to the Poehler Lofts and the Cider Gallery. But the development group there is seeking an exemption from the 55 percent food sales requirement. The proposed building for the bistro is a small one, and won’t have a kitchen space. But plans call for at least one or more food trucks to be set up outside the business, allowing patrons of the bistro to buy food from the trucks and consume it in the bistro, along with the drink of their choice. The development group has said it wants food to be a major focus on the new bistro, but it has struggled to find an operator for the bistro that is willing to invest the considerable money needed to open the business with the possibility that the city could close the business if it falls below the 55 percent food requirement.

Some neighbors have objected to the Eighth and Pennsylvania proposal. The Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission has recommended approval of the bistro plans, but it is unclear whether the project has the three necessary votes on the City Commission.

The City Commission is tentatively scheduled to discuss the Eighth and Pennsylvania proposal at its meeting next week.

In other news and notes from around town:

• Whether you call it The Kaw or The Seine or just a whole bunch of muddy water, the folks in North Lawrence know quite a bit about the problems unwanted water can cause. The area is prone to storm water flooding, and fixing the issue has been on the city’s to-do list for quite some time.

One of the larger projects to help control storm water flooding in North Lawrence has been a planned pump station at Sixth and Maple streets. The project was one that was highlighted by the city as a reason voters should approve a new 0.3 percent infrastructure sales tax in 2008. The project, though, hasn’t yet been built. Other projects, mainly road projects, got in line ahead of the pump station, and then rising construction costs delayed the project again.

But commissioners will take some action tonight to get the project restarted. Commissioners will set a bid date of Sept. 1 to bid the project. North Lawrence leaders likely will be watching that closely to see if the project comes in at a more budget-friendly number. In March, the city bid the project and received only two bidders. One bidder pegged the project at $7.5 million while the other came in at $8 million. Engineers had estimated the costs at $5.1 million. That’s when the city decided to go back to the drawing board and see if they could make some design changes to lower the costs.

There are several changes that have been recommended, but the long and short of it is that the city is now proposing a less powerful pump station for North Lawrence. The new plan calls for a pump station that can handle 100 cubic feet of water per second. That’s down from the original design of 195 cubic feet per second. Engineers said they’re comfortable with the change after they “re-evaluated the hydrologic criteria.” It seems like a significant change, but thus far North Lawrence leaders have not objected.

Commissioners meet at 5:45 p.m. tonight at City Hall.