Cafe Sorelle

Cafe Sorelle occupies a small storefront on Broadway Street in Homewood, Alabama, close to the border where Homewood meets Mountain Brook, though the restaurant’s own listed address places it within Homewood city limits. According to the restaurant’s own account of its founding, Cafe Sorelle began as the dream of a little girl and her mother, who officially opened the business in Homewood in 2017 with the goal of building a neighborhood staple, a place where people feel like they are walking into a friend’s home rather than a commercial dining room.

The restaurant keeps a compact, focused menu built around breakfast, lunch, appetizers, dinner, and dessert, prepared from scratch daily and rotated based on seasonal ingredient availability. Sandwiches, salads, and daily specials fill out the everyday offerings, and the small kitchen has developed a reputation for consistency over the years it has operated on Broadway Street. The name Sorelle, Italian for sisters, adds another layer to the restaurant’s family-oriented identity, and the cafe has kept that intimate, personal feel even as its following has grown within the Homewood community.

Beyond its grab-and-go cafe service, Cafe Sorelle operates a full-service catering arm that has become a significant part of the business, offering boxed lunches for corporate events, grazing tables for casual gatherings, passed hors d’oeuvres, and formal seated dinner service for private events. Customers can work with the staff to build a customized catering menu suited to a specific event, a service that extends the restaurant’s reach well beyond its Broadway Street dining room. Wine, beer, and coffee round out the beverage program, giving the small space a bit more range than a typical breakfast-and-lunch counter.

Cafe Sorelle keeps a limited but predictable schedule, open Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and closed entirely on Sundays. That schedule places the restaurant more in the lunch and early dinner window than a traditional breakfast spot, though its menu retains enough breakfast and brunch character to appeal to diners looking for something lighter than a full dinner entree. The compact hours suit a small operation that depends on a tight-knit staff rather than a large kitchen crew, and the same staff that handles the dining room also plans and executes the restaurant’s catering orders.

The dining room itself is small and unfussy, the kind of space where regulars tend to know the staff by name and where the pace stays relaxed even during the busier lunch hours. That intimacy has become part of the cafe’s identity within Homewood’s broader restaurant scene, offering a quieter, more low-key alternative to some of the livelier bar-and-grill concepts found elsewhere in the neighborhood. For diners who want a straightforward lunch without the noise of a busier restaurant, Cafe Sorelle has carved out a niche that has kept it in business on Broadway Street since 2017.

Cafe Sorelle’s location near the Homewood-Mountain Brook line puts it within easy reach of both communities, and the restaurant has built a customer base that draws from across that boundary. Its combination of a family-founded story, a focused menu, a compact dining room, and a growing catering business has made it a steady presence in Homewood’s food scene, even as flashier restaurants have opened around it over the years.

The catering side of the business gives clients room to sit down with staff and plan an event menu in person, an approach the restaurant describes as inviting customers to lounge and talk through the details rather than working purely from a fixed catering packet. That willingness to build a menu around a specific gathering, whether a corporate lunch or a formal dinner, has become as central to Cafe Sorelle’s identity as its everyday breakfast and lunch service, and it gives the small Broadway Street storefront a reach well beyond the seats inside its own dining room.