Christine Tomasetti-Sherer was not looking to open a cafe when she walked into Dillworth’s in Charlotte. She was traveling, she was twenty-five, and the place just got to her in a particular way. The bohemian energy of it, the range of people working and sitting there, the evident care that had gone into how coffee was prepared — she filed it somewhere, and it stayed filed.
Back in South Carolina, she started looking for a storefront. She found one in downtown Aiken: high ceilings, natural light, room on the walls for art. The space had not been a cafe, but it had the bones for one. She approached the landlord.
He was skeptical. The story he told himself about the neighborhood did not include a hippie coffee shop, which was approximately how he described what Tomasetti-Sherer was proposing. She had no track record in food service. She had $12,000 — borrowed — and a clear picture in her head of what she wanted to build. The landlord had no other offers. He gave her a three-year lease and presumably waited to see what would happen.
What happened was New Moon Cafe. It opened October 16, 1995, and it was immediately, precisely, the thing she had imagined: a community-anchored space that took coffee seriously, sourced local ingredients before that was a marketing strategy rather than a practice, and operated according to the principle that the people who came through the door were worth paying close attention to. Bread baked in-house. Soups made from scratch. A menu that changed with what was available and good rather than with what was easy or consistent.
The Aiken storefront had the clientele Tomasetti-Sherer had hoped for — the kind of mix that a genuine gathering place attracts when it does its job well. Artists, workers, people who needed somewhere to be in the middle of the day. She built MoonBeans Coffees as an in-house roasting operation, small-batch work that gave the cafe control over one of the things it cared most about. The sourcing operation developed into relationships with local farmers and producers that sustained the menu for years.
By 2006, she was ready to expand. Downtown Augusta’s Broad Street had the density and foot traffic that the business needed for a second location. The cafe at 936 Broad Street opened in August of that year, bringing the same principles that had governed the Aiken original to a city that was looking for exactly this kind of place without knowing how to ask for it. The Augusta location is blocks from the Riverwalk, situated on a stretch of Broad Street that has seen its share of commercial transitions over the years but has retained enough foot traffic and civic energy to sustain a business built around people gathering and staying.
The Augusta New Moon operates on rhythms that Tomasetti-Sherer established at the outset: daily bread, made in-house. Soups from scratch. Coffee roasted in small batches. The menu works from what is seasonal and local because that is what the food tastes like when it’s right. The staff knows the regulars. The regulars show up.
What Tomasetti-Sherer built — and it is worth being specific about what that means — is a small local enterprise that has now operated for thirty years without becoming a chain, a franchise, or a concept managed from a distance. Both locations remain independently owned and run. The principles that guided the original lease negotiation with a skeptical Aiken landlord in 1995 are still the principles the business operates by. That kind of consistency across three decades is not accidental. It requires daily recommitment to a set of values that the market does not particularly incentivize.
There is a version of New Moon Cafe’s story that could have gone differently. A third location, then a fourth. Private investment. Brand development. The bohemian-coffeehouse-meets-local-sourcing concept is, in retrospect, one that the broader market caught up to and celebrated in a way that Tomasetti-Sherer was ahead of. She watched the trend arrive without particularly chasing it.
Instead, the business grew within the limits she chose for it. Two locations. In-house production. Real relationships with local suppliers. A staff that stays. A customer base that comes back.
The Augusta cafe on Broad Street sits between the Riverwalk and the Summerville neighborhood, in a part of the city that has absorbed a great deal of change while retaining the commercial character of a downtown that still functions as a downtown. On a weekday morning, the tables fill with the kind of mix that Tomasetti-Sherer saw at Dillworth’s in Charlotte thirty years ago and decided she wanted to create: different people, in the same room, because the coffee was good and the food was worth eating and someone had built a place that made them feel like staying.
She has said that the goal was always to build a business around community support — to be genuinely embedded in the place rather than simply operating within it. After thirty years, the distinction she was drawing is clear. New Moon Cafe is not a business that happens to be located in Augusta and Aiken. It is part of what those towns are.
What a 25-year-old with $12,000 and a clear picture in her head managed to build, on a lease from a landlord who had his doubts, is still open. The bread is still made in-house. The coffee is still roasted in small batches. The soup is still from scratch.
The landlord who gave her three years presumably has fewer doubts now.