Show up to the Village of Pinehurst on the first Sunday of the month before 9 a.m. and you'll find the same thing you've found for years: a loose row of classic cars angled along the curb, engines ticking as they cool, owners leaning against fenders with paper cups in hand. Sandhills Motoring Club's Cars & Coffee still runs 9 to 11 a.m., rain or shine, same corner of the Village it always has.
Walk toward the coffee, though, and the building no longer has The Roast Office name over the door.
For a decade, that coffee came from The Roast Office, tucked inside the Postmaster's window of the old Pinehurst post office building, known locally as the Outpost. It closed for good in the summer of 2025. The business behind it, E&B Café, and its landlord, the Given Tufts Foundation, couldn't agree on new lease terms after the original agreement ran out. If you search for The Roast Office today, plenty of directory sites and review platforms will still tell you it's open, with hours listed and a phone number ready to ring through to a shop that no longer exists there. That gap between what the internet says and what's actually on Cherokee Road is worth untangling, because it says something true about how this Village actually runs: the ritual never depended on the storefront. It depended on the parking lot, the hour, and the habit.
What Actually Closed, and When
The Roast Office wasn't a small tenant. It ran inside the Outpost for ten years, since the building was reimagined from a dormant post office into a community hub by the Given Tufts Foundation. The original lease, signed in September 2014, was extended once and set to expire July 31, 2025. When the two sides couldn't reach new terms, the coffee shop's owners announced the closure themselves, standing outside the building with longtime manager Carol Hess between them.
The building itself didn't go anywhere. The Given Tufts Bookshop, run by roughly seventy volunteers and existing to fund the Given Memorial Library and Tufts Archives, kept operating on the same floor it always had. What left was the coffee counter tucked inside the old Postmaster's office, and with it, the assumption a lot of longtime visitors carried that the coffee and the car show were somehow the same institution.
They never were. Cars & Coffee is organized and run by Sandhills Motoring Club, not by whatever business happens to be pouring drip coffee nearby. The club picked the Village as its meeting point because it's central, walkable, and free to gather in on a Sunday morning. The coffee shop next to it was convenience, not infrastructure.
What's There Now
By August 2025, the Given Tufts Foundation had a new tenant lined up: Brim, opened by Daniel Gironda and Miah Magno, a couple already known locally for their meal-prep business, OTG Fresh, and for managing the cafeteria at Sandhills Community College.
Brim's build-out kept the same Postmaster's-office footprint but extended the counter outward so the space could function more like an actual kitchen. The menu runs espresso imported from Italy alongside drip coffee from local roaster Cactus Creek, plus Italian cream sodas, gelato, breakfast and lunch sandwiches, and pastries, some baked in house and others sourced from Delucia's Bake Shop in Seven Lakes. Current hours run 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekends, meaning if you're walking over from Cars & Coffee on a first Sunday, Brim is open and pouring by the time you get there.
The Sandhills Sentinel reported that Gironda and Magno want the space to feel like Pinehurst's living room. They also have plans to eventually add a beer and wine license and evening live music. For now, the bookshop next door continues exactly as it did under the old arrangement, still volunteer-run, still funding the library and archives, still the same rolling shelves that turn the building into an event space on weekend evenings.
The Ritual That Didn't Need the Storefront to Survive
Here's the part worth sitting with if you live here: nobody rerouted Cars & Coffee when the coffee shop changed hands. Nobody voted on it. The show just kept happening in the same spot at the same time, because the thing that actually organizes a monthly ritual like this isn't the vendor, it's the calendar slot and the physical corner people already know to show up to. The Roast Office was never the reason people came. It was the reason they had somewhere warm to stand while they were already there.
That distinction matters if you're trying to understand how Pinehurst actually holds its own routines together. A lot of the Village's recurring events work the same way, tied to a date and a place more than to any single business:
- Cars & Coffee meets the first Sunday of every month, 9 to 11 a.m., organized by Sandhills Motoring Club.
- Walking Mindfully, a guided meditation walk, also happens the first Sunday of the month, 2 to 3 p.m., a few hours after the last classic car pulls away.
- Live After 5, the Village's outdoor concert series at the Village Arboretum, runs on second Fridays in April, May, August, September, and October, opener at 5:15 p.m., headliner at 6.
- The Holly Arts & Crafts Festival, now in its 48th year, lands on October 17, 2026, at Tufts Memorial Park, drawing more than 200 hand-crafters working in everything from woodworking to metal sculpture.
None of these depend on one storefront staying put. They depend on people knowing, without needing a reminder, that a certain hour on a certain day belongs to a certain corner of the Village.
Why This Is Worth Knowing If You Already Live Here
If you moved away from The Roast Office as your coffee stop because you heard it closed, or if you've been avoiding the Outpost because your last update said the doors were shut, it's worth another look. The bookshop never left. The coffee never really left either, it just changed hands and got a new name on the awning. And the car show that a lot of people assumed was somehow tied to that one coffee counter has been running on its own logic the whole time, independent of who's serving espresso next door.
That's the thing about a place like Pinehurst. The institutions that last aren't always the ones with the most history attached to a single storefront. Sometimes they're just the ones that picked a good corner and a workable hour, and kept showing up.
If you're weighing what a home search or a move within Moore County actually looks like day to day, from the Sunday morning car meets to the fall festival calendar, Rhonda Edwards has spent her life in these neighborhoods and is glad to help you get your bearings. Reach out anytime, and if you're curious what your own home might be worth in today's market, get your instant home valuation and let's talk about what's next.
