Weekday Coffee & Matcha opened Aug. 24 in the former Starbucks location on UCF’s Memory Mall, giving the University of Central Florida a new coffee shop on one of its busiest campus walkways. The shop opened on the first day of fall classes, and it is being run by two alumni who say the place has long felt familiar.
For David Benjamin and Ricky Bravo, the opening is as much a return as a launch. Benjamin, who graduated from UCF in 2021 with a degree in integrated business, said he had walked up and down Memory Mall for years. He said he used to hammock there all the time and play spike ball with friends, which is part of why the new shop feels personal to him. Bravo graduated in 2017 with a degree in sport and exercise science, and the pair became roommates during college in Summer 2016. They have also built different kinds of working experience along the way: Benjamin worked with the Knight Vision program helping the university transition to Workday, later worked at Robinhood and then returned to UCF as an IT project manager for four years, while Bravo started at DUO58 as a volunteer dishwasher and eventually became director of training, trained with the Specialty Coffee Association in California and also worked at Lineage Coffee Roasting.
The shop serves handcrafted drinks, baked goods and house-made syrups, aiming to give students and visitors a more made-from-scratch coffee stop than the one that occupied the space before it. That change matters because the location itself carries the story: what is now framed as a homecoming for two UCF alumni also marks a shift in the campus coffee landscape, with a former national chain space now turned over to a campus-grown operation.
Benjamin said he first spotted a possibility in an empty kiosk near UCF’s Reflecting Pond, a sign that the idea was already taking shape before it settled into Memory Mall. The unanswered part is how the replacement came together on campus, because the public facts show the result, not the terms of the handoff. For now, the new shop is open, the first cups are being poured and the familiar walkway has a new name attached to it.
