"We want Brim to feel like Pinehurst's living room," said owners Daniel Gironda and Miah Magno when they announced their new cafe last August. It is a nice line, and it is true enough. But it also glosses over something worth understanding if you live here and have wondered why the coffee counter inside the old Post Office building keeps trading hands while the building itself stays exactly the same kind of place.
The building is called the Outpost now. It sits at 95 Cherokee Road, a 1934 structure that served as Pinehurst's actual post office before the Given Tufts Foundation took it over and turned the front rooms into a used bookshop. That bookshop has never closed, never changed operators, and never made headlines. The coffee counter tucked into the same building has done all three.
A Building That Runs on Books, Not Coffee
The Given Tufts Bookshop is staffed by roughly seventy volunteers who sort donated books, puzzles, and CDs for resale. Every dollar it raises, along with rent collected from whoever operates the food and beverage counter, goes to support the Given Memorial Library and Tufts Archives across the Village Green at 150 Cherokee Road. The library itself was handed over to the Village of Pinehurst in 2022, but the bookshop and the building remain under the Foundation's care, and the coffee lease is the mechanism that helps pay for it.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. The coffee shop inside the Outpost has never been a fixture in its own right. It is a subtenant, selected and periodically re-selected by a nonprofit board whose real job is funding a library, not running a cafe. For a decade, that subtenant was known as The Roast Office, operated under the business name Elliott's on Linden. Locals loved it. Then, in the summer of 2025, the lease ran out.
What Actually Ended in July 2025
The Foundation's own public statement on the matter is worth reading closely, because it does not read like a landlord picking a fight. According to that statement, the board opened a competitive process before the lease expired and invited the Roast Office's owners to submit a renewal proposal alongside other vendors.
"The owners of the Roast Office refused to do so until the very last minute. The Roast Office's last-minute proposal was not as competitive as the proposals received from other credible Moore County vendors."
The Roast Office closed that Sunday, ending what local coverage described as a ten-year run inside the building. A petition circulated in the days after, and the closure became one of the more talked-about small business stories in the village that summer. But the Foundation's account makes clear this was not a sudden eviction of a beloved tenant. It was a bid process with a deadline, and one side missed it.
Enter Brim, and a Résumé Nobody Had to Fabricate
Three weeks later, the Foundation announced its choice: Brim, run by Daniel Gironda and Miah Magno. Given Tufts Foundation Chairman Stuart Mills framed the pick as a continuity story rather than a fresh start.
"The Gironda family has been a staple of Pinehurst's culinary scene for decades, so we are thrilled to welcome them to the Outpost."
That is not marketing filler. Gironda grew up in the kitchen of his family's restaurant, Vito's, and later cooked alongside his grandfather, Chuck Priest, a classically trained chef who ran the kitchens of multiple country clubs in the area. From there Gironda managed kitchens and cafes across Moore County, including Nature's Own and the well-known Flynn's Coffee Shop, before landing at Sandhills Community College, where he still oversees the cafe inside a space named in his grandfather's honor. Magno brought her own track record through OTG Fresh, the meal-prep and delivery business the couple built together before Brim.
In other words, the Foundation did not just pick the applicant with the tidiest proposal. It picked an operator with a documented decades-long connection to Pinehurst food service, which is a very different kind of vetting than most commercial landlords bother with.
What's Actually on the Menu
Brim opened in a phased soft launch that fall, and by early 2026 it had settled into a routine that locals could set a watch by. The specifics are what separate it from a generic new coffee shop write-up:
- Espresso and gelato imported from Italy, which the owners say avoids the sour aftertaste of cheaper roasts
- Drip coffee from Cactus Creek, the Aberdeen roaster that supplies a good share of the area's coffee shops
- New York-style bagels shipped in from Delucia's Bake Shop in Seven Lakes
- Italian cream sodas and a rotating dessert bar alongside breakfast sandwiches, paninis, and salads
- A rotating selection of prepared meals from OTG Fresh, the couple's original business
Not every review is glowing. Some longtime customers still grumble that the sandwich prices run higher than they expected from a village coffee counter. But the coffee and pastries draw consistent praise, and the gelato has become enough of a draw that people stop in during the afternoon lull just for that.
The Bookshop Next Door Never Blinked
While the coffee counter changed hands, went through a public dispute, sat empty for a stretch, and reopened under new ownership, the bookshop three steps away kept its doors open the entire time. Same volunteers, same hours, same donation bins out front. The Foundation's fundraising model absorbed the disruption because the coffee lease was never the point. It was the revenue stream attached to the point.
That is the part of this story that a quick scroll through a business announcement won't tell you. Brim is a good addition to the village, run by people with real ties to the place. But it is also the second tenant to learn that the Outpost's coffee counter comes with an expiration date built into the arrangement, tied to a nonprofit board's fundraising math rather than customer loyalty alone. If you've wondered why your favorite spot in that building feels a little less permanent than the bookshop next to it, that's why.
Why This Pattern Is Worth Knowing
None of this is a knock on Brim, which by all accounts has settled into its role as a genuine community gathering spot, hosting live music some evenings and floating plans for family movie nights alongside the bookshop's own programming. It's a reminder that in a village this size, the businesses that feel like fixtures are often standing on leases, boards, and funding models that most of us never see. Understanding that doesn't make the coffee taste any different. It just makes you a little less surprised the next time something changes.
If you're new to the village or just curious about the businesses shaping daily life here, Rose A Ward keeps close tabs on what's opening, closing, and changing across Pinehurst and the rest of Moore County. Let's Connect if you'd ever like to talk through what's happening in the neighborhood, coffee included.
