The awning is up at 25 Barbrick Ave SW, the espresso machine has been tested, and by Saturday morning, September 5, the ground floor of NOVI Flats will be pouring its first blueberry-vanilla lattes. The owners are Karlee McBride-Webber and her sister Kayla McBride, a guard for the Minnesota Lynx, and the shop is called 1122 Coffee Co., a nod to the address where the two grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania. It's a good story. It is also, if you live within walking distance of Union Street, not the most useful thing to know about it.
The more useful thing is this: 1122 is opening two blocks from a coffee shop that has been serving downtown Concord for years, and less than a five-minute walk from another that opened its taproom back in 2025. Three concepts, all pouring coffee, all inside a half-mile footprint. The assumption most people make about a downtown that small is that a market like this fills up fast and a fourth or fifth entrant starts cannibalizing the first. What's actually happening on Union Street argues the opposite. Each of these shops is solving a different problem, for a different customer, at a different hour, and that's the reason downtown Concord can keep adding coffee without any of them losing ground.
The Shop That Runs on Regulars
Start with the one that's been there longest. Press & Porter Coffee & Pour House sits at 8 Union St S, and its whole pitch is the opposite of speed. The shop keeps a menu built around regulars, sources bakers, roasters, and kombucha suppliers from inside Cabarrus County, and treats a coffee order as the start of a conversation rather than the end of a transaction. That's a model built for people who already have a routine. You don't stumble into Press & Porter on your way somewhere else. You go because the person behind the counter knows your order.
That only works with a customer base already anchored downtown, which is exactly what Union Street has developed over the past few years as residential density has grown around it. Press & Porter isn't trying to be everyone's coffee shop. It's trying to be a small number of people's coffee shop, several times a week.
The One That Does Two Jobs at Once
Then there's The Nook, which opened its Concord taproom in 2025 after two business owners realized customers kept confusing their companies for years. Percent Small Batch Brewery, a Harrisburg craft brewery, and The Percantile and Creamery, a Concord coffee and ice cream shop, had similar enough names that coffee drinkers and beer drinkers kept ending up in the wrong search results. Eventually the two teamed up for real. The Nook now houses Percent's second brewery location alongside The Perc, a coffee counter serving lattes and pastries, plus a permanent food truck called For Crying Out Loud slinging smashburgers and hot chicken.
The Nook isn't competing with Press & Porter for the same morning customer. It's built around a different clock entirely, a spot that opens for coffee and stays open into beer and live music, dog-friendly the whole way through. It's the shop you go to when the plan for the evening is still forming.
The One Built for the People Upstairs
That brings us to 1122, and here's the part that actually changes how you should think about this stretch of Union Street. Press & Porter and The Nook are both destinations. People drive to them, park, and walk in from wherever they parked. 1122 is different. It was built inside NOVI Flats, the smallest of three boutique apartment communities that make up NOVI at Concord, and the pitch from its owners has nothing to do with drawing people downtown. It's about the people who are already there.
"We're kind of bringing our living room to the neighborhood," Karlee McBride-Webber told Axios Charlotte, describing a shop designed to feel like an extension of home rather than a stop on the way to one. The sisters grew up in a basketball family that traveled constantly and made a habit of seeking out independent coffee shops instead of chains wherever they landed. That habit is the whole concept behind 1122: a 643-square-foot, living-room-style space aimed squarely at NOVI residents and the apartment dwellers nearby, not at commuters passing through.
The menu backs up the residential framing. Alongside standard espresso drinks, 1122 is launching with a short list of signature pours:
- The 1122 Latte, blueberry and vanilla
- A brown sugar honey latte
- Matcha finished with blueberry cold foam
Pastries and sandwiches come from Mooresville's Ladolka Deluxe Bakery, and the shop will run seven days a week, Monday through Saturday 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Those are the hours of a neighborhood spot, not a commuter drive-thru. Nobody grabs a 5 p.m. blueberry latte on their way to work. That's a hangout hour, which fits a shop whose stated goal, according to a company release, is to be a place where people connect and build friendships rather than a grab-and-go kiosk.
What's Happening Just Outside the Half-Mile
The contrast gets sharper when you look at what's opening a few minutes away by car instead of on foot. Building permits filed earlier this year show 7 Brew, the drive-thru coffee chain that has been expanding fast across North Carolina, targeting a standalone location at 1275 Concord Pkwy. It's a 510-square-foot building with no dining room, designed for cars, not sidewalks. An opening date hasn't been set, but whenever it lands, it won't be fighting 1122 or anyone else on Union Street for the same customer. One is built for someone with four minutes and a drive-thru lane. The other is built for someone with nowhere else to be and a laptop.
This is really the whole point. A downtown coffee scene doesn't get crowded just because the number of shops goes up. It gets crowded when multiple shops chase the same customer at the same hour. Union Street hasn't done that. It's stacked a regulars-only coffeehouse, a brewery-coffee-food hybrid, a residential living room, and a commuter drive-thru into the same small stretch of Cabarrus County, and each one has carved out an hour and a customer the others aren't fighting for.
What This Means for Saturday Morning
If you live near downtown and you're trying to decide where to actually go this weekend, the practical answer is simple. If you want to be known by name, Press & Porter is still the move. If the evening plan is undecided, The Nook covers coffee now and beer later without switching locations. And if you live in or near NOVI, or you just want to see what an NBA-adjacent, homegrown concept looks like on its opening weekend, 1122 opens its doors Saturday, September 5, with a grand opening event that includes music from DJ Roxci.
Union Street is under half a mile end to end, and depending on how you count, it's now home to somewhere around twenty coffeehouses across greater Cabarrus County, with several of the newest names clustered right here. That density used to be the kind of thing that made people assume the market was saturated. What's actually happened is closer to specialization. Three coffee concepts, three different reasons to walk in the door, and not one of them is stealing customers from the others.
If you're the kind of person who tracks what opens and closes on your own street, this is the stretch worth watching for the rest of the year. New concepts tend to test a corridor before they commit to it, and right now Union Street is testing very well.
For more on what's happening in downtown Concord and the neighborhoods around it, Kirk Hanson keeps a close eye on the local businesses, developments, and everyday details that make this market worth paying attention to, whether you're deciding where to grab coffee this weekend or just staying current on the place you call home.
