Urbana Cafe
Daniel Noguera, Founder & Owner of Urbana Cafe
Daniel Noguera worked as an editor at a publishing company for many years, a career he delighted in. But once the publishing industry shifted their focus away from physical and toward digital materials, Daniel’s interest in that work shifted too. He needed to take a step back and determine if staying in this changing corporate landscape was what he truly wanted to do, so he hopped on a plane and spent a summer in Italy sorting out his vision for the rest of his life.
“I started thinking, ‘what if I just, you know, build a cafe?’” he says. “But it needs to be a little bit different because, if I just build another cafe, it's just another cafe.”
While visiting Italy, Daniel was surrounded by Vespas zipping around the city, and had the idea to build a mobile cafe with a used Vespa. For many years, Daniel’s weekend ritual included driving to Findlay Market for groceries on the Vespa, loading it up, and heading back home, and he wanted to expand on this beloved routine. “I thought, ‘I want to do this Vespa and coffee thing, and it has to happen at Findlay Market,’” Daniel says.
Building out the Vespa took the better part of a summer. Daniel purchased one used from Canada and it arrived on a refrigerated box truck filled with strawberries. “It was cold to the touch when it arrived,” he laughs. He got to work retrofitting it to accommodate a small coffee bar in the back, often working into the wee hours of the morning to move the project along before finalizing the truck in late summer of 2013.
“We passed our health inspection on a Wednesday, posted something on Instagram to celebrate, and within minutes somebody from Findlay Market called me and said, ‘Daniel, I've been seeing what you guys are doing. Would you like to come to the market?’” That weekend in September, Daniel set up just outside of Saigon Market, sold his first hundred or so cups of coffee, and instantly fell in love.
Before his first setup, Daniel was nervous about the reception of Urbana. He thought, “Who’s gonna buy coffee from this dude with an accent in that little car? But the line was just nonstop that Sunday. It was so much fun.”
For months, Daniel worked full time at the publishing house, then ran Urbana on the weekends. The deeper he got into the coffee industry, the more he wanted to make this his full time job. “I spent over 10 years in a corporation, and in three months working in coffee, the relationships I was making here were more real and more everlasting than 10 years in a corporation. And that human factor was the one thing that changed everything completely,” he says.
In 2015, two years after officially launching Urbana, Daniel toured a small space in Pendleton and knew instantly it was the future home of his very first cafe. Since then, he has been bringing Urbana Cafe to communities throughout the city from Findlay Market to Pendleton, East Walnut Hills, and the Contemporary Arts Center in addition to Moxy Bakery. And even with years of expansion, all of Urbana’s coffee is roasted right here at Findlay Market. “We do so much with this tiny space. We do all our roasting, cuppings and all the quality control, packing subscription boxes—everything—right here,” Daniel says. Urbana’s business model was built around hyper fresh coffee due to storage limitations—a silver lining in such a tight space.
Throughout 13 years in business, Daniel’s focus has always been on maintaining a high quality of product and hospitality. “I didn't build [Urbana] to be something this big,” he says. At every step of the way, whether he’s purchasing coffee directly from farmers or considering how best to welcome guests into the cafe spaces, quality and sustainability is top of mind.
Daniel is Venezuelan, where coffee is deeply integrated into daily life. There isn’t a question of whether you’ll be drinking coffee with breakfast or each time you visit with friends, it’s always there. Daniel frequently hosts friends at his home for arepas and coffee after Saturday morning runs, and his guests always remark how delicious the cafe con leche is, but he argues that what you do surrounding the coffee is what makes it so special.
“It's like when you go to Italy and then you have an espresso in this little square, and you hear the kids playing, and people are speaking Italian, and the day is beautiful, and you think, ‘this is the best espresso I’ve ever had!’ and it's not. Everything around it made it taste delicious,” he says.
In growing Urbana Cafe, centering his guests’ experience and offering them the same warm hospitality he grew up with was a main focus. As was sustainable sourcing. Daniel opts to work with coffee farmers who are aligned on prioritizing sustainability practices on their farm, a tenet he brings to his relationships with local producers as well. “The idea is to do as much business as possible with people who have similar philosophies,” he says.
Looking back at more than 13 years in business, Daniel is proud of the community he’s built alongside his cafes. “I love that I’ve had the opportunity to create this, but I don't feel like it belongs to me,” he says. “I feel like this is very much like this is everybody else's project at this point. The moment you have people working with you, it's no longer mine. It's ours.”
Published September 2026