This Q Coffee Emporium in the Point at Peachtree retail and commercial development on Scottsville Road will soon be joined by a second Q location on Waterbury Court near Nashville Road.

There’s now an “A” to the “Q” about what’s next for one of Bowling Green’s more popular homegrown coffee shops.

Q Coffee Emporium, which in 2019 set up shop in the former Miller’s Transmission Shop on Nashville Road only to abandon that space earlier this year due to legal squabbles with its landlord, is coming back to the Nashville Road area.

The coffee shop and bakery, now operating solely out of its quarters in the Point at Peachtree development along Scottsville Road, has plans to open next year a location on Waterbury Court near the Western Kentucky University Center for Research and Development on Nashville Road.

Steve Wilson, one of five family members who started Q Coffee, said the new location will be a two-story building visible from Nashville Road.

“We hope to start construction soon, and it will be about a 10-month buildout,” Wilson said. “We had to exit over there (Nashville Road), but we had a lot of regular customers.

“That’s a good area of town, a growing area.”

It’s also an area that is now home to the Providence Coffee House, a restaurant owned by family members of the Providence Homes business that owned the original Q Coffee building and have now established an eatery there.

Providence and Q Coffee are caught up in a legal squabble over the building.

Wilson and members of his family filed a lawsuit against Providence in August 2021, seeking damages and claiming that Providence “repeatedly breached the lease agreement by, among other things, failing to timely authorize necessary repairs.”

That legal battle is still playing out, but it isn’t stopping Q Coffee’s owners from moving forward with expansion plans that were baked into the Scottsville Road location.

Q Coffee took three of the five units in the first Point at Peachtree commercial building, giving it a space roughly three times the size of the original store and a 1,600-square-foot bakery designed to serve more than one location.

“It was designed and equipped to serve four stores,” Wilson said. “It will be good to utilize that.”

Plans call for that Scottsville Road bakery to serve the new Waterbury Court Q store, which Wilson said will have indoor seating for 45 people and outdoor seating for another 25.

Like the 100-seat Scottsville Road Q, the new location will serve not only coffee but the bagels, cinnamon rolls, muffins and sandwiches that Wilson says have been a hit.

“We’ve been busier than what we anticipated,” he said. “The sales numbers are good. We’ve recently added Roman pizza to the menu, and that has been well-received.”

With sales so robust, Wilson is already looking beyond the Waterbury Court expansion.

“We do see Bowling Green having a third location,” he said. “We’re also looking at the Gallatin and Hendersonville (Tennessee) markets.”

Like many other restaurateurs, though, Wilson said workforce issues play into his expansion plans.

The Scottsville Road Q Coffee has about 35 employees, and he expects the Waterbury Court store to have close to 30.

With food-service workers hard to come by these days, Wilson cautioned: “You can’t outgrow your ability to staff.”