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Lisa and Billy Truelove plan to open the shop at Fourth and A streets later this year or early next year. It is expected to be both a public cafe and the place where Palace's coffee is roasted.
Lisa Truelove was a teenager working at her parents’ bakery business in Eugene when she learned she could have a career as a coffee roaster.
Now, the 52-year-old Palace Coffee and Bakery owner is working on opening the business’s fifth location.
Truelove and her husband, Billy Truelove, are renovating an 8,000-square-foot brick building in downtown Springfield, with plans to open in late 2026 or early 2027. The location will be “coffee-centric” with a cafe, visible coffee roasting, kitchen and inventory storage for all Palace locations.
The couple started renting the Springfield location at 150 Fourth St., kitty-corner from The Public House, in 2022 to roast coffee beans using a “seafoam green” San Franciscan coffee roaster. They purchased the property two years later.
“We’re happy to be part of changing the face of Springfield,” Billy Truelove told Lookout Eugene-Springfield.
History of Palace
Lisa Truelove was born in Eugene, and her parents owned a wholesale bakery called The Muffin Mill, which sold muffins, cookies and scones to Dutch Bros and other businesses. Her mom started the bakery in the family garage and later opened a retail location on Prairie Road in Eugene.
Truelove recalled talking with a delivery driver for Boyd’s Coffee, a Portland-based roastery, who told her the business’s head roaster had his palette insured for a million dollars.
“I remember thinking as a teenager, ‘Wow, that’s a job,’” Truelove said. “And thinking how cool that was, because I loved coffee. And thinking you could go do something like that, where your job is to know the quality of coffee and taste it.”
After attending college in Texas, Truelove moved back to Oregon and would visit Full City Coffee Roasters on Pearl Street in downtown Eugene. She liked the coffee so much, she convinced her mom to switch coffee purveyors. She got to know the coffee shop’s staff, and in 1999, she asked owner Michael Phinney for a job. She learned how to roast coffee and took origin trips to farms in Peru.
Truelove said Phinney insisted she learn how to do everything.
“I’m super thankful that he did it that way,” she said. “It gave me a lot of confidence.”
In 2020, when Phinney was ready to retire, Truelove purchased the business. Full City had bought the neighboring Palace Bakery about a decade earlier and opened the wall between the two. But Truelove said the bakery was underused, and when she purchased the coffee shop she wanted to revive it. She rebranded using the Palace name, and the bakery has been a big part of the business’s success.
“Coming from a bakery background, there was a lot of potential that could happen,” she said.
Palace is known for its iced pumpkin cookies and sells a variety of pastries, muffins, scones and sweet breads. It also carries desserts such as cannolis along with breakfast sandwiches and burritos. The business also takes pie orders for Thanksgiving.
In 2021, Truelove received two bags of coffee beans from an employee who had traveled to El Salvador to visit her boyfriend’s family. Truelove enjoyed the coffee so much, she tracked down the farms where they had come from. She flew to the Central American country with her husband and son and worked with the farmers to design a Palace house blend.
“I’ve never been tired of it,” said Truelove, who described the coffee as “very smooth” with slight notes of chocolate and dark raisin.
Roaster and cafe
Palace now has locations at the University of Oregon Jaqua Academic Center, the Slocum Center for Orthopedics & Sports Medicine and PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend.
But the Trueloves want a spot that will serve both as a cafe and a place where coffee is roasted. The Springfield spot will provide that.
“In Eugene, we were continuing something that began there,” Lisa Truelove said. “We can do whatever we want here.”
For now, anyone passing by the building’s tall windows can see a large foam rendering of Homer Simpson holding a “Palace Coffee | Bakery” mug. “The Simpsons” art is ubiquitous in Springfield, which the TV show’s creator has said inspired the fictional Springfield that is the setting of the show.
Local artist Rodger Deevers gifted the artwork to Truelove ahead of the Springfield Block Party last September.