Revelstoke Coffee started as the answer to a question.
“We asked ourselves, ‘what would we want in a city that we want to live in?'” said Alex Stoyle, who opened Revelstoke with his wife, Lyndsey, in 2018.
Each eager to start a business in Concord, the answer to that question was a specialty coffee shop — a place to get a proper latte or a pourover.
In the years since, they’ve been a driving force behind a coffee festival and a weekend car show, each drawing crowds and adding buzz to a main street that grows sleepy at certain times of the year.
Now the couple has a new answer to their essential question.
“One of the constant complaints that we hear is that there’s not a place to go after you see a show,” Alex said. “We have all of these craft cocktail bars all around New England that we admire and love and are willing to drive hours to for a great experience, and we see that as something that’s missing here.”
The Stoyles are brewing an expansion of Revelstoke – just a stroll away from the original. In the red-brick cellar of the Monitor Statesman building off Storrs Street, they plan to open a specialty cocktail bar.
Perched upstairs will be a Revelstoke coffee shop and cafe, with a full kitchen for breakfast and lunch. The bar downstairs, a separate business, will offer small plates, tapas-style.
“You can think of it as the same coffee you know and love here at Revelstoke, but a much more robust food program,” Alex said. After dark, “we hope to be that late-night place where you can go on your way to or from dinner.”
The Stoyles share an innate entrepreneurial tick and a deep-seated fidelity for their hometown.
As Revelstoke bloomed, with its distinct, yellow to-go cups and statehouse views, customers floated the idea of opening more locations elsewhere, Lyndsey said. It never really interested them. For the Stoyles, it’s always been about Concord.
The pair met at a festival in White Park. Lyndsey, an event planner, had already been living in Concord and Alex, who grew up in Goffstown, saw a new side of the place that, like so many, he’d mainly known as a place for fourth-grade field trips and holiday shopping.
The main street reconfiguration had brought a new face and a wave of energy – one they’ve both been riding since.
“I looked around, and I was like, this place is not what I remember,” he said. “I basically moved in with her the next week.”
At times, as they prepared to open Revelstoke, they wondered if it was something the rest of Concord wanted as badly as they did. Those worries soon subsided.
“Very quickly, we realized, oh, Concord did need this,” Lyndsey said. “We saw that need, and the community showed us that they agreed.”
With their eyes on a new opportunity downtown, the pair bought the Monitor Statesman building in 2023.
The early 20th-century building, with its blonde facade, is nestled at the bottom of Pleasant Street, looking onto Storrs Street – eyed by city leaders as the next endzone of downtown revitalization.
Once home to an earlier iteration of the Concord Monitor, from 1912 to 1929, the building has since held numerous businesses. Before the Stoyles bought it, a local architecture firm had been prepping it for a new office, but didn’t move forward with construction.
While one-by-one, many historic Main Street buildings received needed renovations and facelifts, the Stoyles worried about the number of appointment-only, nine-to-five businesses along Concord sidewalks inside those spaces.
The Monitor Statesman building, in particular, had always charmed them. The chance to buy presented an open door, both a new chapter of their business and an invitation for the community to share a piece of city history.
“We want people to be able to be in these downtown buildings,” Alex said. “We just saw a wonderful opportunity to let everyone experience the beauty of this space.”
“We’ve always loved that building,” Lyndsey added. “When it became available, we just had to do it.”
The bar has a working title of “The Statesman,” both an homage to the capital city’s political heartbeat and a nod to the building’s history.
The Stoyles are also working out details with the city on using a small, public courtyard – dubbed a “pocket park” – for outdoor seating and an accessible, ground-floor entrance into the basement.
For the bar, they’re on the lookout for collaborators.
The Stoyles are coffee enthusiasts, but they credit General Manager Kasey May – who Alex described as having “forgotten more things about coffee than I know” – for bringing expertise and craftsmanship to the coffee shop.
They’re looking for people with that same in-depth knowledge of mixology and bartending.
In the meantime, they’re putting some serious elbow grease into the building, rearranging the entrances and rebuilding the inside. They’ve spent the last few years prepping and planning, work that’s still underway.
With no set timeline for opening, the goal is for substantial progress in the coming months, they said.
“We are not developers – we are learning as we go and figuring it out from every little piece of it,” Alex said. “But 2026 feels like it’s the year.”
