Concept Coffee Sacramento: When a Chef and a Roaster Meet on a Bike Ride
The best business partnerships often start with something other than spreadsheets. For Scott Ostrander and Ty Manukyan, it started with a cycling group.
Ostrander is a chef and restaurateur — he owns Gami Burger and Origami Asian Grill in Sacramento. Manukyan founded Kingdom Coffee Roasters in Folsom back in 2017, roasting on San Franciscan equipment in a space where customers can watch the process happen. The two kept crossing paths on group rides, found they spoke the same language about food and coffee, and eventually asked the obvious question: what if they built something together?
The answer opened its doors at 1912 P Street in Midtown Sacramento.
The Space
Concept Coffee occupies roughly 1,300 square feet on a block that sees steady foot traffic from Midtown’s mix of office workers, residents, and wanderers. The design, led by Ester Nersisyan (wife of third co-owner Oksen Nersisyan, who’s been friends with Manukyan since childhood), pulls from Japanese and Scandinavian influences — light quartz counters, dark walnut bar fronts and stools, Herman Miller pendant lighting, potted plants stationed like punctuation marks.
“We wanted the space to feel warm, calm and inspired,” Nersisyan has said of the design, while keeping things “fresh, minimal and modern.”
A surprising touch: rotating custom-printed historic artwork hangs on the walls. When the shop opened, it featured a portrait of James McNeill Whistler. The choice is unexpected for a coffee shop, and that’s precisely the point.
The Coffee
Kingdom Coffee Roasters supplies all the beans, which run through Mahlkönig grinders and a Slayer Steam espresso machine. The bar also features a Poursteady automated pourover station for rotating single-origin offerings — useful for maintaining consistency on manual brews during busy service hours.
Kingdom has been roasting in Folsom for nearly a decade now, and Manukyan’s approach tends toward balance and accessibility rather than the extreme light roasts that dominated third-wave specialty for years. The espresso pulls clean and sweet. The pourovers rotate based on what’s coming through the roastery.
The Food
This is where Ostrander’s background shows. Concept isn’t serving croissants and calling it a day.
The menu centers on riffs with familiar foundations executed with a chef’s attention: avocado toast comes with avocado mousse and shaved vegetables, the bread baked in-house. Brown butter Belgian waffles took years of development to get right. The approach emphasizes dishes that are “delicious, different and fun” — phrases that could easily ring hollow, except the team has the restaurant credentials to back them up.
Chocolate sauces and seasonal syrups are made in-house as well. When a chef runs the kitchen and a roaster runs the bar, the details tend to line up.
Three Owners, One Concept
The ownership structure matters. Manukyan handles coffee and brings Kingdom’s roasting operation into the partnership. Ostrander oversees the culinary side and contributes years of restaurant management experience. Oksen Nersisyan, Manukyan’s childhood friend, rounds out the trio with additional operational support. The three appear to have divided responsibilities cleanly enough that everyone stays in their lane.
Hours run 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily — a breakfast and lunch window that makes sense for the Midtown location.
Why This Matters
Sacramento’s specialty coffee scene has been building steadily for years, with roasters like Temple, Insight, and now Kingdom pushing the region’s standards higher. But chef-driven cafés — places where the food deserves as much attention as the espresso — remain uncommon. Most specialty shops understandably focus resources on coffee and treat food as an afterthought.
Concept Coffee inverts that balance, or at least levels it. The gamble is that customers will treat the café as a destination for both coffee and a proper breakfast, not just one or the other.
The cycling-group origin story adds a human dimension that’s easy to overlook in business coverage. Two people met while doing something they loved, discovered complementary skills, and decided to build something together. It’s not a complicated formula. But it requires the right people to cross paths at the right moment — and the willingness to follow through when they do.