Lorem Ipsum founder Justin Hazelton soft-opens And/Or Café at Innovation Barn

Justin Hazelton, the mixologist who founded the Plaza Midwood listening bar Lorem Ipsum, has soft-opened And/Or Café inside Innovation Barn at 932 Seigle Ave. in Belmont, Axios Charlotte reported on October 9. For now the café is open for coffee, with no cocktails yet, Tuesday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., in the space where the Change Please café used to be.

Cocktails come next. Once the cocktail menu launches, hours will stretch to 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., according to Axios, which reported that a grand opening date was “coming soon.” “It’s coffee and/or it’s cocktails. It’s day and/or it’s night,” Hazelton told Axios.

And/Or Café at a glance

The basics for a first visit, from Axios Charlotte’s October 9 report:

• The café is inside Innovation Barn at 932 Seigle Ave., Charlotte, NC 28205.
• During the soft opening, coffee is served Tuesday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
• Planned hours are 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. once the cocktail menu launches.
• The café seats about 60 inside, with room for several dozen more on the patio and around a fire pit.
• Updates, including dates for ticketed tastings, go out on the café’s Instagram account, @and.or.cafe.

What’s on the menu

Coffee runs from espresso drinks to draft lattes made with housemade, low-waste syrups, according to Axios. One example is a Bananas Foster latte made with rescued produce. Food is pastries plus milk-bread or sourdough toast topped with chicken salad, tapenade or housemade jams and butters.

The evening side is still to come, and Axios described the plan this way:

• The cocktail list will have about eight drinks priced from $12 to $15.
• Four mocktails will sit alongside the cocktails.
• Beer and wine will round out the bar.
• Ticketed beta tastings let guests help shape the menu before the full launch.

Much of what goes into the drinks comes from the building and the people around it. The café uses herbs from Innovation Barn’s garden, honey from beehives on site and surplus produce from The Bulb, a neighboring nonprofit, and the café composts food scraps and recycles glass, Axios reported. The café has adopted Section 7 of Grow & Gather, the barn’s urban food forest, where the bed’s 19 plants include basil, bee balm, strawberry, hibiscus, lavender cotton, catmint and coral honeysuckle, according to Innovation Barn.

Music is part of the plan, too. Lorem Ipsum Radio, a DJ space in a shipping container near the café, will eventually stream sets into the café and courtyard, according to Axios.

The bartender behind And/Or Café

Hazelton grew up in Charlotte and has run bar programs around the city for years. He ran the bar programs at two other Charlotte spots before directing the bar program at Greg and Subrina Collier’s Camp North End restaurant when the restaurant opened in June 2020, Axios reported at the time. A later Charlotte Magazine feature on Charlotte mixologists credited him with designing the restaurant’s nine-drink cocktail menu and named his signature drink, the Black Maybe.

Lorem Ipsum opened in fall 2023 as a listening bar inside a hotel at 1101 Central Ave. in Plaza Midwood, and Hazelton co-owned the bar with his wife, Patrice, QCity Metro reported. He told QCity Metro the name was “gibberish text made to mean nothing.” In June 2025, Esquire put Lorem Ipsum on the magazine’s list of the Best Bars in America.

Hazelton ended Lorem Ipsum’s hotel residency about a month earlier than planned, after HVAC problems during a summer heat wave, Unpretentious Palate reported on July 14. By July 20, Unpretentious Palate founder Kristen Wile was telling WBTV that Hazelton had turned his attention to a no-waste café and bar inside Innovation Barn, then aiming for a late-summer opening.

Inside Innovation Barn

Innovation Barn is owned by the City of Charlotte and managed by the nonprofit Envision Charlotte, which runs the building as the hub of Circular Charlotte, a partnership with the city aimed at moving to a circular economy. The barn formally opened on September 17, 2021, after the city spent nearly $5 million renovating the old city building on Seigle Avenue, double the budget City Council first approved, WFAE reported. The building covers about 36,000 square feet.

The café space has a history of its own. Change Please, a nonprofit coffee company that started in the United Kingdom and trains people experiencing homelessness as baristas, opened a café there on March 16, 2023, as the program’s first U.S. location, Axios reported. Innovation Barn’s five-year impact report says Change Please left in 2026 and that a new local café concept was set for October, and the report lists And/Or among the barn’s 12 tenants. Change Please coffee is still poured in Charlotte at The Study Food Social, which opened at The Pearl in September.

The Bulb, which supplies the café’s surplus produce, was founded in 2016 and runs mobile farmers markets in underserved neighborhoods that ask for no referral, ID or payment, according to The Bulb’s profile on ShareCharlotte. Innovation Barn and a sister site, the Landfill Project, kept more than 4,822 tons of material out of the landfill from September 2021 to September 2026, according to the impact report. Innovation Barn is open to the public Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., according to the barn’s website.

What comes next

Three things were still pending as of Axios Charlotte’s October 9 report:

• The cocktail menu had not launched, and the launch will bring the longer 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. hours.
• A grand opening date was “coming soon,” with no date announced.
• Lorem Ipsum Radio’s DJ sets will eventually stream into the café and courtyard.

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