Some restaurants are once-in-a-while places. Maybe they’re a bit fancy. Maybe their menu is a bit one-dimensional. Maybe they’re great for grabbing a sandwich to-go between meetings, or a sit-down Sunday morning brunch while your parents are in town, but not both.

Then there are restaurants that seem like the right place every day. They are comfortable and inviting, begging you to linger and enjoy the space and people around you. The food is good quality and easy to love. The satisfaction ceiling is high, and so is the floor, because they are consistent. These are the restaurants that quickly turn first-time customers into familiar faces.

This is exactly what owners Danny McColgan and Isaac Weiner are aiming for with Familiars Coffee & Tea, tucked into the iconic red diner car on Strong Avenue in Northampton. As their name implies, “we love regulars and seeing familiar faces from behind the counter,” McColgan says. “Really, we love getting to know our community.”

The first thing that stands out about Familiars is its outward appearance. Built by the now-defunct Worcester Lunch Car Company decades ago, the building was designed to look like a passenger train’s diner car. Having graced that corner of Strong Ave for decades, “it’s always had this familiar quality itself, and we wanted to maintain its legacy as a landmark,” McColgan says. Today, from the outside, it looks nearly the same as when it was Kathy’s Diner (from 1989 to 2013), or the Miss Northampton Diner or Red Lion Diner before that.

The inside dining area, however, looks “jarringly different,” in McColgan’s words, compared to both the outer facade and how the inside used to look under different owners.

“Walking in, it feels like a reading room or maybe a public library – warm and academic, sort of,” he says. “There’s antique solid oak paneling everywhere, which was reclaimed from the executive offices of an old paper mill in Holyoke, and there’s a vaulted ceiling in the back room. If people haven’t been in before, they sometimes have a bit of confusion and a bit of awe on their face.”

Upon entering, visitors immediately face the counter where they can place their order before claiming their seat. There are cozy nooks to settle in with a cup of warm tea and a book, while other tables are well-lit by natural light streaming though head-height windows.

The food itself McColgan describes as, “approachable and, well, familiar.” They have options for omnivores, vegetarians and vegans alike, offering seasonal specials alongside a main menu available year-round.

The biggest section of the menu is devoted to perhaps the most familiar food there is in American cuisine: sandwiches. Most breakfast sandwiches start with an egg, sometimes paired simply with cheese and meat or tempeh bacon as a vegetarian option. Others include more inventive combinations like the “Mediterranean,” featuring roasted red peppers, feta and balsamic reduction. Lunch sandwiches include a laundry list of well-loved combinations like BLTs, chicken salad, turkey avocado, apples and cheese, and hummus and veggies. Most sandwiches are served on any bread or bagel of choice, with bagels made locally by Tandem Bagel Company. Pastries, granola bowls, bagels with spreads, sweet and savory toasts, and salads round out the food options.

The drink menu is equally straightforward yet diverse, with many choices for coffee and tea. Most coffee drinks are espresso based, but they also have drip, pour over and cold brew. The tea selection includes white, green, black, oolong, herbal and others. Hot chocolate, specialty sodas, and other unique homemade drinks also make an appearance.

In terms of seasonal additions, “this winter, we have a smoky tofu sandwich with marinated tofu and pickled veggies, and another sandwich with maple-roasted carrots,” McColgan says. “For seasonal beverages, my favorite is our salted maple caramel latte. We caramelize local maple syrup from Snowshoe Mountain Farm to make a very distinct wintery flavor. We also just launched a Biscoff latte, flavored with a house-made syrup made from Biscoff cookies.”

Some ingredients for seasonal specials come from local farms and businesses. So do many of the ingredients they use every day of the year. “As a coffee shop, we use a lot of milk and cream, which we get from High Lawn Farm in Lee,” says McColgan. “We also use a lot of sprouts on our sandwiches, which come from Gill Greenery, and we use Kitchen Garden Farm sriracha because it’s just the best.”

Familiars orders a lot of their produce through Marty’s Local, a distributor that McColgan calls “such an amazing resource. They have connections with a whole network of local farms, which allows small businesses like us to get tons of local ingredients in a single order. It’s such a treat.”

It has been nearly six years since McColgan and Weiner opened Familiars’ doors for the first time. Before that, the two had plenty of experience managing other people’s eateries and retail businesses, but opening Familiars was a leap of trust – trust that they understood what people wanted and that a place like Familiars would deliver. By all accounts, it has.

With the confidence that comes from experience, when the previous owner of the Florence Pie Bar, Maura Glennon, wanted to step away, McColgan and Weiner made an offer to buy and run that restaurant alongside Familiars.

“We heard Maura wanted to sell, and we thought it would be an interesting opportunity to see how the two businesses could work together,” McColgan explains. “We also wanted to preserve the legacy of another beloved space that meant so much to people.”

Ultimately, McColgan and Weiner seem to have a knack for, as McColgan describes, “creating spaces that people enjoy spending time in,” along with recognizing and enhancing ones that already exist.

“Whether that’s through customer service, getting them hooked on a great sandwich, or making the best coffee – or all those factors coming together – that’s our big love,” he says. “We love creating these third spaces that aren’t work and aren’t home, but are kind of a home, that people go out of their way to enjoy.”

Familiars Coffee & Tea is open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily at 6 Strong Ave. in Northampton.

Jacob Nelson is communications coordinator for CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture). To learn more about restaurants cooking farm fresh local food near you, visit buylocalfood.org.