Former Hightstown council president Mike Vanderbeck and his wife now own a coffee shop on Main Street.
By: Scott Morgan
HIGHTSTOWN Amid the memorabilia, the knickknacks and the Americana, there is a photograph labeled, "Hightstown Circa 1900." Outside the J.D. Mount Wallpaper, Toys and Stationery store (that’s Main Street, folks), a horse and buggy go eyeball to eyeball with a strange, horseless coach.
This photograph is a snapshot of a temporal crossroads. The point at which what was meets what will be.
Its placement in the center of the shop is most telling. And it is most befitting the intention of its owner. Here at the Slow Down Café, life is supposed to go a little easier, regardless of what’s ahead.
"It says it on the menu," owner Mike Vanderbeck said. "Good things take time."
Indeed.
In the early afternoon light, the two customers sitting beneath the photograph sipped their drinks and read their papers and tuned out the conversation across the way. Wherever they came from and wherever they were going seemed moot. At the moment, they took the menu’s advice to just, well, chill.
On the opposite side of the café, Mr. Vanderbeck told a certain bookish man a different story. There was a man, he said, who once came to his counter and asked him for an espresso to go.
"So I asked him, ‘Are you really in that much of a hurry?’" he said.
He wasn’t, and he sat down and took a break.
And that’s the point of the Slow Down Café; a point inspired by Mr. Vanderbeck’s recent trip to Florence, Italy, during which he "marinated" in the ambience of a genuinely Italian haunt. A point that says to those bellying-up to the counter, "Take a moment," Mr. Vanderbeck said.
Despite the inherent caffeine buzz associated with hot coffee (and despite that the name Vanderbeck is not quite so Italian), the easy-does-it vibe seems to have caught on since the Slow Down Café opened its doors in December. As the Wednesday lunch hour closed in on 1 p.m., a quartet of girls from The Peddie School dropped in to have a seat. They sat, they talked, they imbibed their caffeine fixes. But if they were in a hurry, they didn’t show it on the outside.
The Peddie School, Mr. Vanderbeck went on to say, offers the bulk of his midday clientele. Between classes, students come in for a quick (well, not too quick) drink; after classes they come back, alongside their Hightstown High School counterparts. In the interim are those like the two women seated beneath the horse-and-auto photograph.
All told, Mr. Vanderbeck said, the door to his corner store is rarely closed for long, whether mothers pushing baby coaches are coming in or students with handfuls of espresso milkshakes (a definite favorite) are heading out.
Whatever the customers leave with, it’s a sure bet it’s made the proper way. Mr. Vanderbeck employs three borough students behind the bar, but before they got there, these students had to pass a rather grueling written test questions like, "Where does coffee grow best?" and "What do you do in case of over-extraction?" And they had to score 100 percent.
There is ice cream here, too. And although there’s no test for that, the marriage of traditional Italian café with modern American ice cream shop is a clever blending of old and new just like the photograph.
"I wanted to keep the whole feel of an old-fashioned ice cream parlor," Mr. Vanderbeck said. "Then crank it up a notch."
For Mr. Vanderbeck, the traffic is validation for an idea he has espoused for quite some time. It’s true, this Mike Vanderbeck is the same one who served as borough councilman for three years. And it was during that tour of duty that Mr. Vanderbeck worked to extol the virtues of downtown revitalization.
"I’ve been talking about revitalization for so long, " Mr. Vanderbeck said. "So I put my money where my mouth was."
As to why he decided on putting his money on a café, Mr. Vanderbeck said, simply, the town needed one.
"I think there was a vacuum," he said.
And with his evocatively named café in place, Mr. Vanderbeck hopes to build upon the revitalization’s favorite ethos: People should be walking around Hightstown and soaking up the ambience.
To assist that goal, Mr. Vanderbeck said, he is planning to install a walk-up window before the summer comes along. It isn’t so much to hurry people along perish the thought. Rather, it’s so women with baby carriages and men walking dogs and kids riding bikes can get a little ice cream on their way around town.
It’s all an attempt, Mr. Vanderbeck said, to get people to pay a little more attention to what is shaping up to be "quite an impressive little downtown."

