Sometimes the interview questions write themselves. When I sat down with the team behind Dart Coffee Co. — David Dart, retired dentist; Erika Carter Dart, still a very active artist; and their son Carter Paul Hallman, winemaker and SBCC Culinary School grad — in Erika’s cozy Green House Studios, I had to open with, “How did painting and dentistry lead you to coffee?”
I knew it would be a lively chat when Erika deadpanned, “Isn’t it obvious?” The short answer turns out to be that art and science brew the best cup of joe. The longer, more fascinating answer involves Dart growing from its original Funk Zone location to a spot on the Santa Barbara harbor and, sometime very soon, a third outpost in Carpinteria’s much-awaited Linden Square complex.
A Hobby Becomes an Obsession
But let’s go back a decade to when it all began. “We were making wine,” Erika recalled, “and we had drunk enough wine. We love coffee. I bought the Blue Bottle book [The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee, the coffee tome that has launched a thousand java shops] and gave it to David, and we realized the process is so similar to wine — the chemistry; we can play with this.” The couple went to Sand Point, Idaho, for a class at Diedrich Roasters, bought a $35,000 roaster, and got to work.
David had sold his thriving dentistry practice to his partners Dr. Kelly Kendall and Dr. Jeffrey Rohde. “It was just a hobby when I bought the electric roaster in 2014,” he says, “then it became a passion, then it became an addiction.” He grew talented enough to gain wholesale clients, which got them thinking they should open a commercial shop…