A concept that started as a creative pivot during the days when businesses across the country were locked down with limited ways to earn income will now be the foundation of a new cafe and bakeshop offering specialty pastries, coffee and fresh bread on Water Street — hopefully as early as June.

Katie Dickson, owner of Bywater (which opened in 2015), officially cleared the final regulatory hurdle by earning the approval of the Warren Zoning Board during a special meeting on Monday afternoon to open up a cafe at 277 Water St., which is directly across the street from Bywater’s existing operation at 54 State St.

“During the pandemic when our dining room was shut down, we did a little pivot to some daytime, purely to-go operations. We did coffee and pastry and sourdough breads as a to-go effort during the daytime to give my staff something to do,” Dickson told the board. “It was really successful and a lot of fun and so when we reopened the dining room we attempted to keep doing that out of our foyer, basically, during the day as a complementary business to the existing nighttime hours at Bywater. That was great but also very challenging just from a space standpoint.”

So Dickson sought out a space that might be suitable to house the operations for a grab-and-go style cafe, and the stars aligned when 277 Water St. — the building directly across from Bywater that is owned by Tav-Vino’s Paul Bullock — became available to rent.

“About 12 or 15 years ago it had been a cafe/retail space before, apparently,” Dickson said at the meeting. “The electric is still there for an espresso machine, and so we don’t need to do much work to the space, so that was really attractive to me as well.”

The plan is for the cafe at 277 Water St. to operate during the morning and early afternoon hours, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., before Bywater opens at 5 p.m. During the time the cafe is open, the four spaces located in the Bywater parking lot will be available to cafe customers.

Dickson told the zoning board that since the cafe will only feature 16 seats inside to start, and that primarily the business will be a to-go operation, she doesn’t anticipate any issues related to parking.

“We did try this business model at Bywater about a year and a half ago with no issues related to parking,” she said. “So it has been sort of tested.”

Additionally, Dickson received support from the board to utilize the 277 Water St. space for special events during nighttime hours when Bywater is closed.

Reached Tuesday morning, Dickson said that the cafe and bakeshop will offer many of the favorites that customers grew to love during the lockdown, including a specialty sticky sourdough miche bread, fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies, and croissants. Although the zoning board approved the shop to be open seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., the exact days of operation and hours are still to be determined. Dickson said it was likely the shop would be open five days a week to start.

An online fundraising campaign through Mainvest was launched last month to support the opening of the cafe. It had eclipsed the minimum of $75,000, and sat at just over $92,000 as of Tuesday morning. Dickson said she was hopeful that they could continue to close in on the $124,000 limit within the remaining week of the fundraising effort.

“I’ve never done this sort of business model before where I was able to sort of test it out with relatively low overhead. It would have been great not to have to press pause on it, too, but in a way it was nice to reset because we ended up getting great feedback about people regarding what they missed.”

Those extra eager to get some of the sweet Bywater Cafe goodies can get an early crack at the action as well, as Dickson got approval to be included in the Providence Farmers’ Market, which begins May 6. Pre-orders are available at the cafe’s Instagram page, @BakeShopWarren.