Karen Henry-Garrett, left, stands with an employee in the new Dot2Dot Cafe coffee stand in City Hall. Jennifer Smith photo

Dot2Dot Cafe has a second home for at least the next six months. The Dorchester Avenue-based eatery will be serving up hot coffee and baked treats to the in-town masses from a new base in the center of City Hall.

Karen Henry-Garrett, co-owner of the cafe, was on-site at the new coffee stand last week, helping to get things up and running. She told the Reporter that they had a six-month contract, with the possibility of extending it into something more permanent if all goes well.

“We are just four days in,” she said on Friday while overlooking the stand from the City Hall lobby. “We’ve been learning as we go along, but hopefully we’ve been catering to everyone.”

She and her staff were waiting for an espresso machine to arrive, but the steady flow of morning customers and the lesser crowd that passes through in the mid-afternoon seemed fine with standard coffee during the first few days. As customers have asked for variants like soy milk and almond milk, the cafe has stocked up on them.

The offer for a stand in Government Center popped up in December 2015; a few short weeks later, after some quick assembling of equipment, the beech-framed setup is functioning well.

Two employees will run the stand in the mornings for the heaviest flow of customers, and one will stay for the slower afternoon hours. A number of her employees in Dorchester and City Hall are graduates of the New England Center for Arts & Technology who are helping to set up the new arrangement.

On the Dorchester front, the cafe is still working on leveraging the liquor license that it obtained through the neighborhood-specific license program championed by at-large Councillor Ayanna Pressley.

Dot2Dot is serving dinners, but it is leaning more toward an event-dinner model for now, “because it’s been hard to get the word out,” Henry-Garrett said. “We’re still not getting a huge amount of walk-ins, so I’m going to try to plan it around dinner-style events,” she said. They might be author dinners, in collaboration with Dot2Dot’s bookshop component, or theater events featuring a play over several nights.

Henry-Garrett is looking ahead to Valentine’s Day, always a busy night for restaurants, with a special dinner at Dot2Dot. With a run of bigger holidays to come – St. Patrick’s Day, Mother’s’ Day, Father’s Day – she plans to offer dinner and drinks options.

By transforming the cafe into a base for dining, music, and art, Dot2Dot Café, which has a reliable breakfast and lunch clientele, hopes to make it a destination for evening entertainment as well.