The Smell of Success
The owner of Caffé Moderne has seen her share of ups and downs, from flying in air shows to battling breast cancer. Now, she’s found comfort in coffee.
Jarrett Medlin
She pushes the mug forward. “OK, you’re going to take this coffee and smell the aromas in there and tell me if you can smell a fruit flavor,” she says.
I take the mug and inhale deeply. To my surprise, I catch a faint whiff of something sweet. “It’s cherry, but you would never know it,” says Rine. “This cup is so smooth that you can let it sit for two hours, and it won’t go sour. Fifty percent of this is Ethiopian. You can’t get better.” Rine explains the coffee’s secret: larger cocoa beans, a delicate balance of mineral and filtered water, the way in which gourmet coffee is ranked like a fine wine.
She abruptly stops talking and takes one last whiff of the coffee. “Oh, gosh,” she says. “You can almost smell cherry and vanilla.”
It’s Rine’s noticeable passion that has made all the difference at her Old Town eatery, Caffé Moderne. In fact, the ambitious entrepreneur recently competed in the Sweet Bean Competition—a Kansas City contest that has baristas, bartenders and mixologists squaring off to create a signature coffee drink—and she took first in three of the top four categories. “What’s amazing is that I’m not a bartender or a barista, but I still created the No. 1 drink,” she says.
The same can be said for everything at Caffé Moderne. Since opening last March, the restaurant has carved its own caffeinated niche in the heart of Wichita. Rine was among the first to bring gelato to Wichita. (Now, the creamy Italian ice cream is popping up all over town.) She worked alongside chef Tanya Tandoc to create a popular menu of homemade panini sandwiches and soups. (In fact, Wichita readers recently voted Caffé Moderne’s sandwiches the best in town, topping even long-time favorite The Artichoke.) For a woman with no previous restaurant experience, it’s an impressive accomplishment. But Rine’s path to coffeedom has crossed places you might not guess—a career in medicine, a stint as an air show character known as the Dragon Lady and an arduous battle with breast cancer—before she realized her true passion: coffee.
From X-Rays to Coffee Beans
The youngest of four, Janet grew up in Great Bend, Kansas. Her mother, a secretary in a hospital lab, encouraged her to pursue a career in medicine. So when the time came, Janet chose to earn a degree in science at Wichita State University. It was there that she met her husband, Grant Rine, who now serves as Wesley Medical Center’s Director of Radiation Oncology. The couple moved to Kansas City in the mid-’70s, where Janet finished her medical degree at St. Joseph Medical Center. The Rines moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina for two years before returning to Kansas City for Grant to earn another doctorate. While there, Janet worked in radiology. “It was technically challenging and wonderful,” she says. “When you feel like it makes a difference in others’ lives, that’s really special.” She also began earning her pilot’s license to overcome a fear of flying.
The Rines returned to Winston-Salem in 1991, and Janet became a health consultant specializing in mammography. Her boss, a world-renowned physician named Dr. Robert Dixon, paid for Janet to earn additional flight ratings, so she could fly to other states as a health consultant to regional medical facilities.
Her interest in flight continued to grow as she got involved with the Winston-Salem Air Classic. She flew a T-28 alongside Dr. Dixon during air shows. When it was time to go to her first air show, Dr. Dixon handed her a leather name badge with the words “Dragon Lady,” a character from Terry and the Pilots, a 1940s adventure comic strip. “I just wore it out of good humor, and it stuck,” she recalls. “Everybody in Winston-Salem knew me as the Dragon Lady. They did not know my name was Janet.”
In 1998, the Rines moved back to Wichita. Janet began working for the Sabris Corporation as a flight instructor at Jabara Airport. It was around this time that she discovered a lump. She went to a doctor for a mammogram, and her fear was confirmed—she had breast cancer staged at 11 years. Despite the fact that she’d specialized in radiology for more than a decade and received annual breast exams, no one had seen it. “It was read with a lot of different eyes, and nobody saw it,” she recalls. “I’ve always had an argument that we don’t need just mammography, we need ultra-sound.” She was 41 at the time. Some of her friends were dealing with cancer. And her chemo treatments backfired, causing severe side effects that occur with about 10 percent of cancer patients. Janet decided it was time to step back from her job and straighten out her priorities.
One morning, she woke up with a vision. She recalled decades earlier, while living in Kansas City, going to a Westport coffee shop for coffee, bagels and conversation with a friend. “There was a comfort zone there,” she recalls. “There were no coffee shops like that in Wichita. Everything here was so full of smoke. I wanted to recreate that comfortable atmosphere, so I too would have a place to go.”
A Cool Idea
Gelato wasn’t always part of the plan. It was during a month-long trip to Europe in April 2006 that she and a close friend, Christopher Templeton (an actress from The Young and the Restless) discovered a frozen dessert with a third of the fat found in ice cream. “It was the one and only thing we looked for,” she says.
When Janet returned to Wichita, she dived headfirst into the restaurant business. “As a radiation technologist, I’m all about research,” she says. “I research things to death.” In December 2006, she attended Frozen Dessert School in Florida and learned to make ice cream and gelato. She custom-ordered a gelato display case, one of three of its kind in the world, from Italy and asked the distributor to have it painted Ferrari-red to match the shop’s espresso unit. “It’s the only Ferrari-red gelato machine in the world,” she says. She attended trade shows, coffee festivals and frozen dessert conferences. She began reading magazines like Restaurant Owner and Imbibe. She ordered gourmet coffee beans from countries like Costa Rica and Ethiopia. (In fact, Caffé Moderne pays more for its beans at wholesale prices than Starbucks sells at retail prices, she says.) She had a special water filtration system installed for the coffee. She renovated a space in Old Town Square with an Art Deco design—complete with marble-tiled walls, a long wooden bar and neon green lights. “It sort of reminds me of Casablanca,” she says. “It reflects that feel-good era when people treated each other with respect.”
Finally, in mid-March of last year, Janet opened Caffé Moderne. She began hearing positive feedback almost immediately. “People were coming in and saying, ‘Thank you. We’ve needed this for a long time,’” she recalls. A year after opening, the restaurant is usually packed for lunch and a popular place for coffee, gelato and conversation in the evenings. Local artists have flocked to the eatery and now comprise the majority of Caffé Moderne’s wait staff. “We’re a little like family,” says Janet. “They’re an amazing group.” The restaurant showcases a different artist’s work each month, and local musicians often perform on Friday and Saturday evenings. Janet also invites employees to create new gelato flavors with fresh ingredients. Of the 15 flavors in the display case, Caffé Moderne often has everything from a White Russian to the bestselling peanut butter chocolate, though it varies every day. Janet takes such pride in the gelato’s quality that she once refused to sell a mixture of chocolate and lime to a customer. “My employees sometime joke that I’m the Gelato Nazi,” she says.
Despite working seven days a week, Janet finds time for life outside work. She often takes friends up in her plane, a Cessna 172 nicknamed Angel. During Halloween and Christmas, the Rines decorate their College Hill home with elaborate decorations. And Janet’s 83-year-old mother, nicknamed Mimi, often helps make gelato.
A year after opening the successful downtown eatery, Janet hopes to expand Caffé Moderne’s concept. She recently added soups made from scratch to the menu. She’s also exploring the idea of bringing the restaurant to other markets. “For some reason, I just have to keep taking it a step up,” she says. Caffé Moderne is also expanding to the space next door, adding a conference room and bringing in another display case for gelato to go.
Reflecting back on it all—her battle with cancer, her time as the Dragon Lady and her venture as a restaurateur—she says, “Remember, even when you’re beat down, you can always come back. After all, you only have one life.”
