Katie’s Cars and Coffee, Great Falls

Katie’s Cars and Coffee takes over the Great Falls Village Centre in Great Falls, Virginia, every Saturday from 6am to 9am. The meet’s own Instagram account gives those hours and adds three words that settle most questions before anyone asks them: rain or shine. Katie’s Coffee House, at 760 Walker Road, is the address everyone uses.

Which cars can come has a short answer too. In the meet’s Facebook group, the reply to that question is one word: anything. Spaces go to whoever arrives first, which is why the regulars arrive early.

When to arrive

The meet started as a 7am show, and older listings still say 7am. The current hours, on the meet’s own account and in its Facebook group, run from 6am to 9am.

The posted start is 6am, but that is not when the good spaces go. In 2018 Kearney told the Great Falls Connection that his staff gathered at 4:45am on Saturdays, and a car owner told the paper that a prime spot meant arriving by 5:15am. The field thins out toward 9am, and at 10am the Great Falls Farmers Market opens next door at 756 Walker Road.

Rain or shine is the meet’s own phrase. The Virginia tourism listing says weather permitting instead, so on a stormy morning the Instagram account is the place to check before the drive.

Where to park

Katie’s own stretch of asphalt fills first. On a big morning the crowd spills into the neighboring merchants’ lots of the Village Centre, which is how Middleburg Life described it in 2018, and Kearney told the Connection that on a fast day the street is packed all the way around the block.

Those lots belong to businesses that open for the day as the meet winds down. Park in a marked space, keep entrances clear, and walk the last stretch rather than circling for something closer. A meet in a shopping center lasts exactly as long as the shopping center wants it.

The coffee

Katie’s Coffee House sits next to The Old Brogue pub and describes itself as an illy café serving coffee, lattes, teas and fresh baked goods. Its own page lists carryout from 7am to 11am.

That is an hour after the meet opens. The 6am crowd comes for the cars, and the coffee line starts at 7am.

How it started

The meet began in 2010. According to Middleburg Life, a regular named Bob Morris wanted to recreate an auto event he had attended on a trip to California, and brought the idea of a 7am show to Mike Kearney, the owner of Katie’s Coffee House. Kearney admits he was skeptical. “Seven in the morning, are you crazy?” he remembers saying.

“The first Saturday we did it, I think we had nine cars,” Peter Garahan told the magazine. Jeff Olson described what came next: “After a couple of months it was about 50 cars. Then you woke up, and it was 100 cars.”

By 2018 Kearney put a good-weather Saturday at 500 to 600 cars. One Saturday that July, he told the Great Falls Connection, 325 show cars and 600 or 700 visitors had arrived by 8:30am, and he called it a slow day. The press had found the meet well before then: a group of Jalopnik readers met there in 2013, and Washington Post columnist John Kelly took his Datsun roadster there for a 2014 column.

What keeps it running

A weekly meet on private lots survives on goodwill, and Kearney said so plainly in 2018. “We have to be very careful,” he told Middleburg Life. “There have been many other cars and coffee events that have been shut down. Shut down because of noise, because of irresponsible drivers.”

That makes the etiquette simple. Arrive quietly, leave slowly, keep the revving and the burnouts for somewhere else, and do not step into the exit to film a car pulling out. None of it is complicated, and all of it is what next Saturday depends on.

The best-known incident in the meet’s press history happened at walking pace. In August 2016 Patch reported that a driver trying to parallel park a red Mercedes backed onto the hood of a Ferrari 458 Speciale. Nobody was hurt.

Before you go

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