Meet You Where You Are: An Interview with Matthew & Karla James of Okay Coffee

There's a lot of bravado in the coffee world. Single-origin this, micro-lot that. Matthew James knows this world well, having been in it for over a decade, and he named the shop he opened with his wife Karla accordingly.

It’s a joke, sort of. Set expectations low, and when people taste it, they're surprised. But it's also a statement: no gatekeeping, no performance, no requirement that you arrive already knowing things. You're allowed to like what you like. 

It's a philosophy that should sound familiar to anyone who's spent time at Visual Index. 

Both businesses exist in fields with a reputation for making outsiders feel like outsiders — and both of us have decided, pretty deliberately, not to do that. Matthew and Karla sat down with us between kegs to talk about how Okay Coffee came to be, what the name stands for, and why they think curiosity is a better qualification than expertise.

AS: Tell me about Okay Coffee — when did you open, and where did the idea come from?

Matthew: August 17th, 2025 was our opening day. I'm a big coffee nerd. And I like to think the name is a funny joke — it sets expectations low, so when people actually have it, they're like, this is great. That's kind of the point.

AS: Was the name there from the beginning?

Matthew: Yeah, pretty much. It came together when I was already doing the wholesale side; I'd been kegging and distributing coffee for about two and a half years before we opened the shop.

AS: But I’ve heard there's more to "Okay" than just the joke about expectations.

Matthew: Yeah: it’s okay to not be okay. I've done years of personal therapy, and it's been a huge help. I want to encourage others to be open to it. Having a community is the first step in bridging that gap…being able to say, hey, I'm not okay, and that being okay.

Karla: And therapy is expensive. We wanted to find a way to give back to the community. So we partner with Banyan Tree Counseling, which is local. About every two months, we choose a topic, they send someone in, and we just open it up — free to the community. We set up about forty chairs, they do a presentation using that wall as a projection screen, then take questions and open it up for discussion.

AS: What have the topics been?

Karla: ADHD for adults and children. Men's mental health. Boundaries without guilt. It's been really well-received.

AS: Matthew, you were at Camino on Fourth Street for close to a decade — how did that shape what you're building here?

Matthew: That's really where the nitro side of things took shape. I built out their setup and just tried stuff, tinkered. I also built the wholesale operation while I was there — I'd been kegging and distributing coffee for about two and a half years before we opened the shop. I take roasted coffee — mostly local, North Carolina and South Carolina — brew it, keg it, and send it to different places. Some are resale, where another coffee shop will white-label it as their own. Others are a little weirder: a church, office buildings, real estate agencies. It works because the drinking culture is shifting away from alcohol pretty quickly, so a lot of these places have beer tap equipment already set up and nothing to put in it.

AS: Karla, how did you come into the business?

Karla: I was baking at Louie & Honey while he was wholesaling. We got married in January and kind of hit a point where we had to either go all in or not do it at all. So I left baking and came on board. This is really his baby — I'm just trying to help along.

AS: What does your role look like day to day?

Karla: Essentially everything that needs doing. He knows how a coffee shop runs — he's been in it forever. I came in knowing nothing about that side, so I followed his lead. I handle the social media, the events, the products.

I've been in a lot of customer-facing roles. I've been a nurse and an EMT. Baking started during COVID. I was also a barista at one point. None of it necessarily led directly here, but it all adds up.

AS: How did you two meet?

Karla: I was working downtown while he was still managing Camino, and I would go in before my shift. One morning he was making drinks at the bar, but when I went up to the register, he stepped in front of the other person and took my order himself.

Matthew: And then I orchestrated how to keep running into her.

Karla: And it worked.

AS: Are you both originally from Winston?

Karla: I was born in Boston, grew up in Charlotte, then lived in Virginia and Philadelphia before moving here. I've been in Winston for maybe six or seven years now.

Matthew: I was born in New York, moved to Louisiana as a young kid, and came to Winston about twenty years ago. Most of my life has been here. We like to travel, so having a quieter home base is nice.

AS: Was this location specifically the plan?

Matthew: The location was actually kind of by chance. I know the person who owns the building and it just felt right. We didn't even anticipate opening a retail space this fast. I was thinking end of 2026, maybe.

Karla: Real estate is ridiculous right now, both commercial and residential. So when something lines up, you move.

Matthew: The space actually has two floors; I do all the brewing upstairs. There's a big brewer up there and piles of kegs. The plan eventually is to run lines from the ceiling down here so I don't have to bring the kegs downstairs three times a day. They're not light.

AS: What other kinds of events have you done beyond the Banyan nights?

Karla: The Banyan nights are the only recurring one. We've done a drag story time for kids — we want to do another, for adults this time. We have a book swap coming up. We've done a clothing swap. Just different things to try to build a local customer base alongside the convention crowd.

AS: The Benton Convention Center next door seems like a big part of the foot traffic picture.

Matthew: It's huge, but it's unpredictable. Every convention is different, some hit really hard, some don't move the needle. This past weekend was an anime convention, which I loved. We're both nerds in our own right. We saw a couple hundred people in cosplay. We're still figuring out the patterns, and that'll help us plan better next year.

Karla: Yeah, I do the social media, so I'll post while events are happening to get the word out. But mostly it's just people walking by and seeing us.

AS: Okay, let’s back up—what is nitro coffee, actually? People have all kinds of ideas about it.

Matthew: It's a bit of a misnomer. People think "nitro" means stronger coffee — and in a lot of places it does, because when you're cold brewing, some people don't weigh it out correctly and you get way more concentration. But ours is more traditional. We use a one-to-seventeen ratio, which is kind of the golden ratio in the coffee world. Ours is actually mild compared to most.

Karla: The difference is texture. When it's charged with nitrogen and comes out of the tap, it's just smoother.

Matthew: It also messes with perceived acidity — your brain doesn't register it as acidic as it actually is. And I think that's part of why people drink it fast. The texture and the brain just go, yeah, this is great.

Karla: We always have customers who get their drink, sit down, and get another one in ten minutes. I'm still surprised by it. I can't drink coffee that fast!

AS: And the brewing method you use — is that standard cold brew?

Matthew: No, it's actually pretty uncommon. It's called crash chilling. Cold brewing is where you steep it cold for sixteen to twenty-four hours. Flash chilling — also called the Japanese method — is brewed hot and quickly cooled by diluting it with ice. What I do is similar but different: I brew it hot, get all the extraction you'd get from normal brewing, and then crash it cold using the same method beer brewers use — a stainless steel coil in an ice bath. I kind of cobbled together the machine myself. There's even a boat part in there, something that's supposed to separate seaweed, but it does great for coffee grounds. I can have a full keg done in about forty minutes, and that keg holds fifty drinks. Cold brew takes sixteen to twenty-four hours for the same result.

AS: Have you always been a tinkerer?

Matthew: Always. Hence the Legos. I actually got accepted into the Hayes School of Music at Appalachian and then just didn't go — I didn't want to be a teacher. So I quit, picked up a job in a restaurant, and built a tiny house within six months for about ten grand. Zero construction experience. YouTube, my dad helped a little, I messed it up and fixed it and messed it up again. That's kind of my MO.

AS: You also have a heated nitro tap — I've never heard of that.

Matthew: I've only been to one other shop that has one, in Pennsylvania (Denim Coffee). It's a very niche machine. Most places don't need it because they have drip brewers. But for us, it means the hot coffee is already made — I just pull the tap. For hot lattes I spin around and steam the milk separately. Even then, customers always say, "that was so fast!"

AS: What does someone order when they walk in for the first time?

Karla: We usually start by asking: hot or cold? Coffee-forward or milk-forward? A lot of people come in not knowing what to get, so we've gotten good at guiding them from there.

Matthew: And we don't have an espresso machine, which surprises people. They walk in and start looking for one. But if you just handed them the drink without explaining, they wouldn't know the difference.

Karla: Someone will come in and say "I normally get a macchiato at Starbucks, what can you make me?" And I'll say, okay, the closest we can do is an iced draft latte. They're fine with it.

AS: Is speed a deliberate part of what you're building?

Matthew: Yeah. A lot of the time it's just one of us working, especially on weekends — the other one is with the kids. I've had a line out the door and a ten-minute wait. When everything's already prepped, I'm probably saving a minute per drink just by not having to pull espresso. For iced drinks I pull two handles and a latte is done in seconds.

AS: Who do you want walking through the door? Who's the customer you're most hoping to reach?

Matthew: Honestly, anyone who's curious about life. We had a couple come in from Poland — they were dropping their daughter at Wake Forest — and they just kept asking questions. We ended up talking about the solubility of nitrogen, how coffee seeds grow, the sugar content at different parts of the seed. They let me go as far as I wanted to go. I don't care what kind of person it is. I just like finding people who are interested in learning something.

Karla: And at the same time, we have older folks come in and say, "I just want a black cup of coffee." So I give them the hot nitro without calling it that. They taste it, they like it. We've been pretty happy with the range of people we've seen. It's been diverse.

Matthew: The reception has honestly been better than I expected, given that this is a pretty weird take on how coffee should work. People don't like to go outside their bubble. But if you just meet them where they are.

AS: Why did you want art in the space? How did the Visual Index partnership come about?

Karla: I'm a big lover of art and a big supporter of local artists trying to sell their work. That's usually the goal — to make a living from it. We have the wall space, so why not use it? I've known Toni for a few years. So I knew what she was doing and knew it was the right fit.

Matthew: It's about sparking curiosity. Having a space feel inspiring. Especially coffee shops — people come to work here because they don't want to work at home, they think differently in a different environment. Putting art on the walls changes the way you think.

AS: Wait — Karla, you make work?

Matthew: She kind of glossed over that. She's a visual artist.

Karla: Illustration, especially children's illustration. I did a coloring book for SECCA, but mostly it's been personal work. I haven't been doing much of it lately.

Matthew: Imposter syndrome is weird, man.

Karla: I try not to turn my hobbies into careers because then they lose the thing I love about them. The only illustration work I did for the shop is the flowers on the bar front — I designed those and then we had a local painter execute them.

AS: How did you develop the visual aesthetic of the space overall?

Karla: It's a mix. I lean more whimsical, but we also like modern. We're just trying to make it as cohesive as we can, and that'll keep evolving.

Matthew: We renovated the entire space in a month. And we'd gone on our honeymoon two weeks before opening.

Karla: We came back with a week left to get everything ready.

AS: Tell me about the products you carry — the retail side.

Karla: The coffee we sell — Loom Coffee Co., which is a roaster out of Greensboro — connects to what we brew. But the other products I've sourced myself: mostly women-owned businesses, and ceramics from local Winston-Salem artists. We've been rotating things out and keeping it whimsical.

AS: You mentioned you're not a snob about coffee. Is that a deliberate stance?

Matthew: I hate snobbery about anything, but especially coffee. One of my biggest mentors is James Hoffmann — one of the leading figures in the field — and his whole approach is: if you love it, great. "The customer is always right" has been misinterpreted— the real quote is “the customer is always right in terms of flavor”. It has nothing to do with service. It means you're allowed to like what you like.

If someone tells me they like dark coffee, I'll say, cool, you probably want Central American then — African coffees tend to be more fruit-forward. If someone wants sugar, that's cool. And before I explain what nitro is, I'll ask: how deep do you want to go? They tell me, and I gauge from there.

Karla: Before I met Matt I was a Starbucks drinker. He'd make me different coffees, and gradually I started to be able to tell — this one's off, this one's really good. He converted me without making me feel bad about where I started. For as much as he knows about coffee, he is not a snob about it whatsoever.

AS: What do you want someone to know about Okay Coffee before they've ever been in?

Matthew: The coffee we use is probably twenty to thirty percent more expensive than what most shops carry, and that does come across in how we price things. But there's a reason. And just: try new things. We just got to try a peach co-fermented coffee from a roaster we work with. Co-fermentation is a really new process where the seeds are steeped with other ingredients before they're even roasted. The peach fully comes through — it almost becomes a completely different drink. You couldn't put it in front of someone and say, here's a coffee. You just have to try it.

Coffee is getting really interesting right now. And you don't have to go to New York or San Francisco to find quality anymore. You just have to find the right person who cares about what they are doing. We have a few really good shops in Winston. We're proud to be one of them.