The people
The Lantern is being built by Regis and Erin Acosta, a husband and wife who live in Rochester with their two dogs. Erin is a social worker. She is the one who will be baking the pastries, and a good deal of the reason the room will feel the way it is meant to. Regis went to the University of Rochester and came back. His working life has been in law and in technology: three years in a legal clinic building tools for people who could not afford a lawyer, and since then at Thomson Reuters, first delivering software into large law firms and government agencies, then as a scientist on the team that tests how well that software actually works, and now advising the people who use it. He teaches a spreadsheet course at Nazareth University on Tuesday nights. On the side he runs Royal Coast Media, a small independent studio that publishes The Olive Branch Review, a writing platform and community, a mobile game, and a film and television review channel.
None of that is running a bar. They know it, and it is why The Lantern will be run day to day by a general manager who has run a licensed room before. What they bring is the rest of it: the programming, the community of writers and readers already gathered around The Olive Branch Review, and a habit of writing down every assumption and checking it, which is how the business has been planned.
Why this room
They have spent years working in coffeehouses and going out in bars, and the two never happen in the same place. The coffeehouses that stay open late do not pour a drink. The bars with a stage are closed until five and dark three nights a week. Every one of them is a good business, and none of them is a place you could spend a Tuesday afternoon and a Friday night. The Lantern is the room they kept looking for.
How it is being built
Carefully, and in the open. The business is financed with the founder's own money and a small-business loan, not with investors, and the plan behind it has been written so that every number in it can be checked. Founding memberships will be sold before opening, and the money from them will be held separately until the doors open. Nothing on this site takes payment.
Get in touch
Performers who want a Thursday or a Saturday, coffee roasters and brewers who want to be poured here, and anyone with a question: hello@thelanternroc.com.