Alta Coffee Offers a Refuge From Daily Grind : Comfort is served daily at the cafe situated in the Cannery Village section of Newport Beach.

Rare is the entrepreneur who would describe his business as “an old shoe.”

But Steve Lewis, the new part-owner of Alta Coffee Warehouse & Roasting Co. in Newport Beach, has seized successfully on that image to attract people to his cafe and coffee-roasting company.

His cafe, Alta, is in the Cannery Village section of Newport Beach. A homey place with echoes of Berkeley or Big Sur, Alta allows customers to bring their own mugs and get 25 cents off a cup of coffee. Those mugs, in all shapes, sizes and colors, stay in the shop, where they line a cupboard after being washed by Alta employees.

“It just feels comfortable to people of all types, from local surfers to the mayor,” said Lewis, 49, who works long hours on site managing the cafe.

At Alta’s 31st Street location, bright turquoise, yellow and green modern paintings hang on pine walls, and the worn wooden floor tells the tale of a thousand feet. Julio, the resident cat, looks lazily up from a chair as the Steely Dan song “Bodhisattva” plays on the stereo. White lace curtains filter light onto a bouquet of pink flowers stuffed into an eggshell-blue tin teapot on a wooden counter.

Alta also has live music and poetry readings on occasion. Sunday night, for instance, was “Groovy Night,” featuring pop and rock music.

“This isn’t the anti-mall, but the Cannery Village is kind of the Soho or the Melrose of Orange County,” Lewis said. “It’s very eclectic.”

Indeed, the cafe is known for much more than its coffee and ambience. Some customers swear by Alta’s $3.50 bowl of Zuni Stew, a blend of vegetables and beans with New Mexico chiles. Breakfast features freshly baked crepe cakes, scones and coffee cake.

Lewis, a longtime Newport Beach resident, has been in the restaurant business since 1980; he once owned The Blue Beet Cafe in Newport. He and his Oregonian business partner, Cordy Jensen, co-own Alta and an Oregon micro-brewery called Steelhead Brewing Co.

Lewis said he wanted to get back into the local restaurant business with something unique, so when friends Patti Spooner and Tony Wilson, who founded Alta 10 years ago, decided to sell, he and his partner were ready to buy. Spooner and Wilson are now part owners of the wholesale side of the business and Wilson is the master roaster.

Alta uses about 600 pounds of coffee each month and expects cafe and wholesale revenue this year to approach $1 million, Lewis said.

Though he would not reveal how much he and his partner paid for the company in November, 1993, he did say that they spent $300,000 to open a second store in Costa Mesa’s Triangle Square in May, 1993.

“We’re always being approached to open more stores, especially in the large malls,” Lewis said. “It’s possible . . . but we’re (more) concerned with uniqueness.”

Orange County has seen a notable increase in the popularity of coffeehouses.

Just north of Alta on Newport Boulevard is Rock-N-Java, a successful Los Angeles-style coffeehouse that plans to open a second location soon, owner Harley Hall said.

“We’re kind of funky, kind of a bordello style, so we’re very different from Alta,” he said. “That’s why we both do well;we’re different. They’re excellent. They have a great business.”

Another local coffee fixture is Diedrich Coffee, a 23-year-old family-owned company in Costa Mesa. It has opened three new Orange County stores in the past three months, bringing its total to seven. The company’s wholesale business more than doubled last year, said Don Holley, vice president of operations.

“We’re not trying to be the Starbucks of Orange County,” he said, referring to the Seattle-based national chain of 295 stores, seven of which are in Orange County. “We’re trying to be the Diedrich of Orange County.”

Alta is a competitor, even though it roasts and treats its coffee differently from Diedrich, he said. “I hope they are still a competitor of ours a few years from now.”

Lewis is hoping the same thing, and he’s optimistic. Sales volume at the new Triangle Square store is ahead of projections, he said, and “we’re a debt-free company. If we stay profitable, it will be almost impossible for us not to be around.”

If your Orange County company has annual sales of less than $10 million, we would like to consider it for a future column. Call O.C. Enterprise at (714) 966-7871.