PHILADELPHIA, Miss.-—Moonbeam Hallows, owner of The Grindhouse coffee shop in Philadelphia, Mississippi, glides between the kitchen island and the espresso machine on July 8, 2026, fulfilling customers’ needs as she has regularly since reopening the noir café in 2024. Housed on Main Street, the coffee shop contains purple and black walls that ring of 2000s pop-punk, while aromatic notes of caramel dance through the air.
A life-size mannequin of Michael Myers from the popular “Halloween” franchise greets patrons near the entrance, with Hallows’ husband Greg Hallows comic-book store, Dollar Ben Collectibles, situated to the café’s left. In the coffee shop, custom Grindhouse shirts hang upon the wall by the restrooms, and a shelf stacked with board games that customers are encouraged to borrow and play lines a nearby wall. Above a multitude of syrups, a television plays NPR Music Tiny Desk Concerts.
Hallows decorated The Grindhouse with comfort and originality in mind so that passersby could swing in and experience a café atmosphere that may differ from that of a traditional coffee shop.
“I didn’t want anybody to come in and feel uncomfortable, you know?” Hallows said. “You know, some places you go and it’s kind of like stark white. … I just want clean and comfortable.”
Moonbeam has owned the building since 2007, briefly opening a coffee shop in 2008. She closed the shop but refurbished the space in 2024 and opened The Grindhouse MS.
Owning her own business was always part of Hallow’s plan.
“My whole family’s a family of entrepreneurs,” Hallows said. “When I was 14, I had a beeper company, (and) I sold pagers. My uncle had a communications company. He was like, ‘You want to sell pagers?’ Like, yeah, I want to sell anything. I was terrible at it. They were getting their service cut off left and right.”
Now an adult, Hallows’ business acumen has increased, with The Grindhouse currently rated at an average of 5.0 stars on Google Reviews.
Sourcing Local Ingredients
As an intentional effort to support fellow Mississippi businesses, The Grindhouse sources both its milk and coffee beans locally. Thunderhead Mississippi Coffee Company in Jackson, Mississippi, roasts the café’s coffee, and the Philadelphia-based Beason Family Farm provides The Grindhouse with its dairy products.
“I can call them on Sunday and be like, ‘I’m out of milk,’ and they’ll be like, ‘Well, we’ll bring it up,’ and they just come on over,” Hallows said. “They’re always really good to us, and it’s the best. It’s delicious.”
In addition to the product the café receives from local suppliers, The Grindhouse makes some of its own signature syrups such as banana, raspberry chocolate, pandan, ube, and graham cracker. In total, the coffee shop offers more than 20 syrup options, including sugar-free syrups. With the establishment being one of only three local coffee shops in town, some customers come every day.
“There’s not really any other place in Philly to me that’s like this … at least that I know about, (and) I’ve lived here my whole life,” Jacob Goforth, a native of Philadelphia and a regular customer who has been frequenting The Grindhouse for the last two years, said. “I don’t really have any other place I can go that’s like this, that I can just call up my friend and ask him to show up, and we can play a board game.”
Going to a coffee shop always led Hallows to be more productive in her own experience, so she wanted her own café to provide a similar space for guests to use. “I always liked going out to the library or coffee shops when I was in college,” Hallows said. “I want people to have a third place. I want a safe place where people feel comfortable to come in and do their work.”
Hallows offers board games for customers to play during their visit, an idea cultivated from the two penny tables inside. “We made this counter out of pennies that took two weeks to lay,” Hallows said. “We had a bunch of pennies left over, so we made it checkerboard so we had checkerboard pieces left over, and it just kind of evolved from there.”
Beyond hot and iced coffees, The Grindhouse sells drinks such as regular tea and milk tea, smoothies and lemonades alongside dessert options like rice-crispy treats and “mookie cuffins,” a take on cup-shaped cookies. The staff likes to come up with other ideas for on-the-go treats throughout each year, so offerings may vary with each visit.
When Goforth first began visiting The Grindhouse, his drink of choice was the s’mores latte. Over time, though, he has drifted to preferring lotus drinks, a type of caffeinated beverage that comes in the form of a lemonade, soda or frozen lemonade. A frozen lotus lemonade is a combination of frozen lotus, lemonade and a choice of syrups.
The Family
For Lola Mae Hallows, Moonbeam’s daughter, this isn’t just her family’s business. It’s a place where she can hang out, work with her best friends and express her creativity via the different syrups and drink creations she comes up with like the Nutty Nana, made with banana and peanut butter, and the s’mores latte that Goforth favored. “That was a lot of just tinkering and sort of alchemy, trying to figure out how to make a graham cracker syrup,” she said.
When her parents were setting up the Neshoba County coffee shop, Lola Mae was there alongside them helping her mother craft the menu, painting the counters that the café keeps its syrups on, and otherwise assisting in organizing The Grindhouse’s layout. Some of the furniture inside the coffee shop came from when Moonbeam briefly opened a café in 2008, while other pieces came from the Hallows family home or from thrift stores. The Hallows crafted a couple fixtures in the shop by hand, like the counter topped with pennies.
“The pink couch came from my house,” Moonbeam pointed out during a July 8, 2026 interview at the café. “Those booths came out of Anderson Hospital. … My dad and I made those tables, and our bar is covered with pennies. (The bar) was the existing counter that was here from the electronics store (that was here before), but we put on mahogany rails and put pennies all over the top and laid it down.”
Galvanized by her parents’ entrepreneurship, Lola Mae wants to open her own business one day.
“My parents have both been very inspirational for me, because my dad has his own business, the Dollar Ben Collectibles, and a slew of other things he does—he’s probably writing a book back there. And then my mom, she’s always working,” Lola Mae said, “I would love to have my own theater company, and to run my own theater.”
For now, though, Lola Mae helps her parents organize events that The Grindhouse holds. Every Monday night, the café hosts music bingo, and once a month, the shop holds trivia nights with different themes. Every Friday, during summer months, The Grindhouse does an in-house movie night on the TV placed above the syrup counter.
During Friday movie nights, the café offers speciality drinks that correspond with the movie that will be played. While Hallows’ movie-licensing deal does not allow her to disclose the movies ahead of time, customers have to come prepared for a surprise—though she can announce the specialty drinks that will pair with the films as a hint of sorts.
The Business
For Moonbeam Hallows, her business is not just a work of her own, but a combination of the people she works with and her customers.
“The thing about my sweet baristas that work here is that they treat the shop like it was theirs,” Hallows praised. “They treat each customer like you would want to be treated, and they … make sure everything’s clean and everything’s done just right. They don’t cut any corners, so … I feel bad being the face of a place, you know, because I’ve got such great staff.”
As a customer, Goforth is impressed by the atmosphere that the Hallows and other employees establish within The Grindhouse.
“It really feels like they have a lot of passion here that a lot of people don’t,” Gofforth said. “They all have the same kind of attitude; that’s also the only place that I’ve known to be that way, because they’re always so nice and they always know your name.”
For more information on The Grindhouse (314 W. Main Street, Philadelphia), call 601-885-4494 or visit thegrindhousems.com. To keep up with the coffee shop’s event schedule or specials, follow The Grindhouse on Facebook or Instagram.
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