Pot 'n' Kettle Coffee House owners Ryan Dent and Denise Stafford sell Blake Street cafe

As they head into their final week as owners, Ryan Dent and Denise Stafford expressed their gratitude to the Wagga residents who have made the old-school cafe their regular haunt for the past nine years.

"Because of where we're located, a lot of people don't even know we're here, but thankfully we've had our own sort of micro-community and a lot of loyal followers," Mr Dent said.

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The husband and wife behind the Blake Street business have sold the cafe to new owners who will be taking over from Saturday.

Mrs Stafford says moving on from the venue is bittersweet, considering it has been the centre of the couple's lives for almost their entire relationship.

"We'd only been dating for a year and I heard this little place on Blake Street was for sale so we came here for breakfast, fell in love with the space and then it all just happened from there," she said.

Since then, the pair have had two children, married and kept the business alive during a pandemic.

They made the decision to sell the cafe last Christmas to focus more on their young family.

"When things are great they're great but when they're not it can mean the kids have to go stay with their grandparents and so on," Mr Dent said.

"It's quite a turbulent business to run with a young family and I suppose we were just ready for change."

The venue will not be closed at all during the changeover and Mrs Stafford says there is not likely to be any instant changes.

"They're actually super keen on keeping it basically exactly as it is for now," she said.

"Obviously when you buy a business you come in with fresh ideas of your own, but they would like to keep it mostly the same at least for 12 months before they go changing things."

Blake Street is currently the subject of an ambitious proposal which would see a six-storey apartment block built next door to the cafe, while also transforming the road into a boutique avenue.

Mr Dent and Mrs Stafford believe the transformation will make the street busier and more attractive, but they also hold concerns for how the shade from the building will impact their cafe's popular courtyard.

"That wasn't the main deciding factor in us selling though," Mrs Stafford said.

Mr Dent said the transformation of the street will likely herald a "new era" for the cafe, which the new owners were keen to embrace.

"They see it as a positive so hopefully they will springboard off that," he said.

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