Tigard’s new Ava Roasteria coffee space opens to enthusiastic crowd

Published 12:33 pm Wednesday, July 30, 2025

After almost three years after ground was broken — and no less than three Tigard mayors championed the project to completion — the Ava Roasteria Center mixed-use building on Main Street is now complete.

On Monday, July 28, local businesspeople, politicians and the general public welcomed Ava Roasteria’s new flagship space during a ribbon-cutting event sponsored by the Tigard Chamber of Commerce. The ground-level retail space now boasts an Ava café, in-house bakery — designed to bake all kinds of goodies including cakes — a coffee roastery and The Roastery whiskey lounge.

The 12535 S.W. Main St. complex not only includes the new coffee ventures but contains 22 apartments on the top two floors. All but one unit is already rented in the tallest building on Main Street.

The new shop brings to five the number of Ava Roasteria coffee shops in Washington County.

Praise for Ava Roasteria

Sara Tanner, Tigard Chamber Board chair, praised the new location, because Ava’s “goal is to serve these communities, which now include ours, with the highest standard of quality and to provide a unique experience for everyone that walks through their doors.”

Amy Saberiyan, Ava Roasteria’s founder and an owner, said the grand opening was years in the making that succeeded after persistence and collaboration transformed a vision into reality. That persistence included having to move numerous boulders along the way.

“Standing here at the heart of what was once a dormant ‘brownfields,’ we celebrate not just a new chapter to our small business, but the rebirth of this space into a vibrant, welcoming gathering place,” she said.

Brownfields are generally properties whose redevelopment or reuse is hindered by the presence of potentially hazardous substances, which developers are required to clean up to make them usable. Saberiyan is no stranger to transforming such properties into desirable pieces of real estate, having opened the first Ava Roasteria coffee shop at 4655 S.W. Hall Blvd. in 2006 on the site of a former gas station.

Cutting through red tape
Among those praising the new space was a representative from U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas. While the Tigard Democrat was ill and thus not in attendance, a staff member read a statement praising the new location as a site that took “vision, persistence and the business acumen to overcome difficult, structural and red tape barriers.”

Also joining the ribbon-cutting ceremony was Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read, whose job includes overseeing corporations operating in the state. He said he was a longtime fan of the Hall Boulevard coffee shop.

“There’s one other reason I’m here. I think so much of this place that I’m happy to tell you that our daughter is now an employee,” he said.

Mayor Heidi Lueb said when the city looked at the site 14 years ago they thought, “gosh, there has to be something better than what’s here to help transform our downtown,’ and so we purchased the property,” Lueb said. “We received a $400,000 (Environmental Protection Agency) grant, and we started working to clean up the brownfields.” 

Lueb said Saberiyan “had the vision to actually bring our downtown to life, and that is exactly what this building is.”