One of the joys of our time in Acadiana was hanging at The Little Big Cup, a restaurant and coffee shop opened last year by Kevin Robin, when he returned to Arnaudville from New York—with a partner he met there in tow.

How did you convince Sanjay to move from New York to tiny Arnaudville I ask? “His only condition was that there had to be a coffee shop,” Kevin responded with a chuckle. “And so I opened one.”

Here’s an excerpt from a piece I wrote about The Little Big Cup for Country Roads Magazine:

“We’ll have acoustic music on the deck and let it drift off lazily over the bayou.“

That really is just how Kevin Robin talks. And thirty seconds into the conversation you can’t wait to hear what he’ll say next. The 1800 square foot deck in question will be behind the restaurant he’s opening in Arnaudville next door to The Little Big Cup, a combination coffee shop and restaurant he opened with his partner Sanjay Maharaj last fall. It was so wildly popular from the start that he explains, “The restaurant hijacked the coffee shop.”

And Robin is very clear that he has a distinct mission in mind for each part of that equation.

He’d like the coffee shop to continue to be a a gathering spot—a community “nucleus.” A place where folks can come to visit with their friends, a place that’s embracing. Robin’s family runs a local grocery store that has long served the community, and just inside the entrance to The Little Big Cup are the vintage doors to the old store from which his family’s business evolved. Intended, he explains, “to bring people to a place of their childhood, when they pulled on those doors.”

Robin has recently returned to Arnaudville from New York where he was pursuing doctoral studies in neuropsychology. Which helps explain the way he expresses one of his visions for this place. “My idea was to create a place where we can foster intergenerational connectivity.”

And just how does one do that? In part with a really big table in the middle of your coffee shop. Each afternoon, his plan is to gather a half dozen folks from a nearby nursing home, and pair each of them with two latchkey kids to help them with their homework. Has it become clear yet that this place is about a lot more than a cappuccino and biscotti?

The restaurant next door draws upon that same vision.

“We decided to become the home of the $5 plate lunch,” Robin says, but adds that the special will be available in the evening as well.

“It’s traditional stuff like most of the folks would cook here,” he explains, delighting in the fact that they’ll often get an order from someone with a request to deliver the meal to an elderly parent so they won’t have to cook that evening.

What a guy. Glad I’ve had a chance to get to know Kevin and Sanjay a bit. Hope to see them again on next year’s swing through Louisiana.  Keep up with the evolution at The Little Big Cup’s Facebook page.