Homage to the Coffee Shop
Part I
MY LOVE AFFAIR with the coffee shop has continued unabated for well over a decade. A love letter is long overdue.
The coffee shop is my sanctuary, my commons, my study. Each entry is a return, a homecoming. My heart rate goes down, and my sense of wellbeing goes up. Then I take a sip, and both heart rate and wellbeing increase in tandem.
It is not all about the coffee, although it is increasingly about the coffee. Very early on, I decided against frilly and expensive drinks. If this was going to be an enduring vice, I wanted to be economical about it. You can better afford to be discerning about coffee and beer; there is something of a price ceiling. To become discerning about wine or liquor is potentially ruinous. For this reason, I drink lousy wine and shun liquor altogether.
It is difficult to put a finger on what makes a great coffee shop. It is a complex, multivariable function. After many years of study, I can isolate certain factors: lighting, music, clientele, quality and consistency of coffee, comfort, banter of baristas (pleasant? snarky? irreverent?). Yet, much of what determines whether a coffee shop is a one-timer or becomes part of the pantheon defies explanation. It is ineffable. Perhaps you were reading a passage from a book that set your mind ablaze and imprinted itself on that place. It may be nostalgia, or the position of the planets, or the artwork on the wall. It may have been a coffee shop recommended by someone you hold in high regard and thereby benefits from their luster. A scientific approach to coffee shop excellence takes us only so far before dissolving into capriciousness and mystery.
In the coffee shop, you are both alone and connected to the whole world. People buzz about you. They talk about politics, divorces, movies, crushes, business plans, and very occasionally, about some topic which you had never before considered. Sometimes your ears are attuned, and sometimes it is all white noise. More often than not, you have your nose in a book and are being transported somewhere, or an idea is introducing itself and incubating in your brain. You have your journal on hand because these thoughts are slippery and vanishing like dreams upon waking.
A coffee shop has its rhythms—daily, weekly, and annual. It has its birth and death, periods of sickness and of health. There are changes in ownership that may barely register a blip, although usually they are either fatal or life giving. The pulse of a coffee shop is easily taken. You listen to the baristas. You gauge morale. You note whether the sugar bin is kept full.
WHEN A FAVORITE coffee shop goes through a rough patch, you become concerned, as if a dear friend were suffering an illness. An unmistakable pall descends upon the place; something vital is on the wane. If you are deeply attached, you stay at your friend’s bedside, even though it depresses you to see her this way. If you are not so attached, you simply harden your heart and seek greener pastures.
Several years ago, The Coffee Society in Cupertino came upon just such hard times. There was a change in ownership, things got sloppy, the clientele thinned out. This is the end, I thought. I was distraught. The Coffee Society was my high school sweetheart, my first true love. With no other coffee shop had I enjoyed such a long and loving history. Cupertino has no downtown or main street to speak of. The Coffee Society is the tiny, pulsing heart of that amorphous suburb where I grew up. It welcomes all comers: Goth kids, Silicon Valley types, the community college crowd. This is the highest calling of the coffee shop: to raise a big tent, and to serve without judgment as a refuge for each peculiar soul.
The months and years passed. Nothing changed. The Coffee Society did not go under, nor did its condition improve. It troops on stubbornly to this day, disheveled and a few steps removed from its former glory, but still serving admirably as a hub of community and connection. The pulsing heart of Cupertino has a murmur, but it still does its job of pumping oxygen throughout the system. What I feared to be a terminal illness has turned out to be merely chronic.
THERE IS SICKNESS and death, but there is also rebirth. Consider the case of Morgan’s in Monterey.
When it comes to coffee shops, the Monterey area enjoys an embarrassment of riches. Within a radius of two miles, there are no fewer than four outstanding coffee establishments and several very decent ones. Morgan’s was the crown jewel of this mother lode, and it is still the standard by which I evaluate each new locale I encounter.
Morgan’s had great coffee, and it had character in every sense. Located in a turn of the century stone building that once housed the Monterey Herald, Morgan’s sat impressively on the corner of Pearl and Abrego streets, a fetching and improbable turret rising above the entry doors.
The Movie Casablanca was adapted from a play called Everybody Goes to Rick’s. In Morgan’s heyday, a playwright would have had ample material to pen Everybody Goes to Morgan’s. The crowd at Morgan’s was the most diverse imaginable, and Monterey is not exactly known for its diversity. There was the group of old Sicilian fishermen yammering away in their crazy, mushy dialect. There were artists and poets and students, as well as close-cropped young men from the Defense Language Institute, listening intently on their headphones to Arabic, Chinese, Korean, or Russian. There was the contingent from the Monterey Institute for International studies, fresh-faced folks from Japan and Nigeria and Belgium, talking about nuclear disarmament and the United Nations Development Program. An old homeless gentleman came in one evening and sat down next to a well-dressed man to my right. "I’ve got your book," he said, and they proceeded to talk literature at great length. It was that sort of place.
There was a bookshelf in one corner, and upon it were black notebooks labeled Morgan’s Journal I, Morgan’s Journal II, and so forth. I think there were ten volumes in total. Inside were years’ worth of customers’ doodles, poems, scribbles, profanities, sketches, nonsense, and the occasional profound, anonymous crying out of the soul. Hanging from the rafters was an American flag. In place of fifty stars there was bold, white lettering that read THINK. I have never been so cheered by an exhibition of patriotism. Thomas Paine, I thought, would be pleased.
The man behind all of this was Morgan Christopher. As an owner, Morgan was hands-on and present. More often than not, you would see him bustling about the shop, tweaking this and that, frowning at a display of scones and moving it just so, darting in and out of his office. Morgan the man was as much an institution as his establishment.
It came as a sickening shock, therefore, when my mother informed me over the telephone one afternoon that Morgan was selling the shop. She sent me the article from the Herald that had a smiling photo of the new owner in front of the stone turret. He would keep to the spirit of Morgan’s, the article said, and the name would stay as well. It was some consolation, but I was uneasy.
When I paid a visit to the new Morgan’s a few weeks later, my fears were confirmed. The new incarnation had no life, no spirit. Gone were the journals, the flag, the old Sicilians. Gone, in fact, was the lion’s share of the clientele. The music was loud, and yet the place was quiet as a tomb. There were flies everywhere.
On occasion, I would stop by Morgan’s to see if fortunes had changed. Each trip was a descent from the previous one. It was depressing. The place was in a tailspin. The new owner changed the name to Storm the Tower in an act of desperation. Things went from worse to flat lining.
During this dreary period, I got wind of a new place called Café Noir on Alvarado Street connected to the Osio Independent Theaters. The owner, it seemed, was none other than Morgan Christopher. Or, as rumor would have it, the actual owner was Morgan Christopher’s wife. This maneuver was supposedly employed to wiggle around certain components of a non-competition clause included in the transfer of ownership of Morgan’s. Morgan had something of a reputation for shrewdness in his business dealings, so such whispers of dirty pool carried some plausibility. True or not, I admit to having enjoyed the intrigue.
One Saturday morning, during a visit to my parents’ house in Monterey, I parked my car downtown and walked quickly past Morgan’s. It emanated despair. I felt ashamed, like I was forsaking a dying family member. When I entered Café Noir, I nearly laughed out loud. Here were the Sicilians holding court as always. Here were the military men with their headphones, and the international students with their earnest talk. The old Morgan’s staff was all intact. The whole apparatus had just picked up and sallied over five blocks. I looked around and noticed that there were no journals. Alas, not everything had made the leap.
Café Noir was a humming, agreeable place; and it was alive. Still, it was never Morgan’s. Storm the Tower was slipping further into obsolescence. Then things began to get interesting.
Within a year, the whole Monterey coffee shop scene went into a chrysalis and reemerged, transformed and more resplendent than ever. Morgan moved shop again to an old warehouse in nearby Sand City and applied his golden touch to The Ol’ Factory Café. Café Noir became Café Lumiere, which retains the former’s charm if not its edge. Storm the Tower was sold and put out of its long misery. In its place emerged the wonderful East Village Coffee Lounge. And in an old, mechanic’s garage in Seaside, a burly, copiously tattooed master roaster named Larry Thurman opened ACME Coffee. The coffee was so good, and Larry and his wife were so welcoming, that people went out of their way to this quirky little setup with its one table and its lawn chairs positioned next to the parking lot as if there were beautiful beach sunsets to behold instead of acres of asphalt.
Seaside is a proud, sturdy, blue-collar town; and Larry, his wife, and their customers are proud, sturdy, blue-collar folks. The small mob that amasses around ACME’s garage door every morning is a menagerie of policemen, mechanics, teachers, builders, electricians, and city employees. There is camaraderie here, and everyone mills about amicably as they fuel up for the day. This is not sissy coffee. Larry makes it strong and by the cup. The roasts have names like “Valve Job” and “The Mexican.” A cup of Valve Job makes you want to thump your chest, like a Viking berserker, and let out a war cry. The Mexican is just the smoothest, darkest, loveliest elixir you will ever come across. Larry carries it only one or two months out of the year. The other months, you ask him persistently, "Getting any Mexican soon, Larry?"
Part II
IT WAS A pound of Larry Thurman’s whole bean Valve Job that I packed carefully into my rucksack. I was bound for Japan, and the Valve Job was bound for Highway 11 Coffee, on the outskirts of Tokyo.
Momo first brought me to Highway 11 in the fall of 2005. She liked to go there to grade papers and chat with the fellow who ran the place.
"It’s the real deal," she assured me. And so it was.
Mr. Highway 11 (as we came to refer to him) was a retired engineer. He loved coffee, so he opened a coffee shop. He also loved Hawaii, so he named his coffee shop after one of that state’s highways. He traveled to Hawaii several times per year, and during these trips the shop was closed for long durations. He was certainly not in it for the money. In fact, I suspect the shop was hemorrhaging money. He loved coffee, loved Hawaii, and he built his life around these two pillars. The simplicity and good sense of it smacked me in the face. It was a dunk in a cold mountain stream.
Mr. Highway 11 had a dozen or so coffees that he would grind and brew for patrons, and he served them with an array of hand-made treats. He was always amused and smiling and laughing a funny, halting laugh. He seemed wildly, serenely, and incurably happy. We always left his shop with a bag full of freebies that he insisted upon us. The freebies always had more monetary value than what we had actually purchased. As I say, the shop must have been hemorrhaging money. Yet, this serene little coffee saint was not concerned in the least.
I presented Mr. Highway 11 with the pound of coffee from ACME. He held it aloft gently and examined it, amused, and smiling his beatific smile. I took his picture, which I later printed with the caption ACME Coffee Fan Club: Tokyo Chapter. I gave this to Larry, very much savoring the idea that I was creating a link, however ephemeral, between two masters of the craft.
BEFORE MOMO INTRODUCED me to Highway 11, I was in a quandary every time I visited Asia. I felt I had little choice but to shell out for Starbucks or Tully’s. I suffered a small crisis of conscience each time I supported these chains that were spreading, at that time, like blight throughout all the big Asian cities.
Options were slim. For a brief and stoic period, I decided to help stem the growth of the American chains by withholding from them my yen and my won and my Taiwan dollars. Instead, I went to the fledgling, indigenous Starbucks knock-offs: Excelsior and Doutor in Japan, Ikari and Mr. Brown’s in Taiwan. Each was decidedly sub- par in its own unique way. The coffee was typically a close approximation of hot motor oil. My courageous boycott was short-lived.
There was one particular Starbucks, however, that I frequented even during my principled stand against global corporatism. It is commonly asserted that the Starbucks in question is the world’s busiest in terms of revenue per day. This assertion should surprise no one who has been there.
The Shibuya district is the Tokyo one envisions after seeing the movie Lost in Translation. It is kinetic, frenetic, and pulsating with sound and neon light. Shibuya Crossing is a turbulent sea of humanity. From the second floor of the Unofficial Busiest Starbucks in the World, you watch the sea ebb and flow. People collect behind the crosswalks—impossible numbers of people—and then the lights change, and it is as if a dam burst. This flood of people spills across the boulevard and then disperses into side streets or drains into the subway. All the while, people are gurgling out of Shibuya main station, replenishing the spent reservoirs at the intersections. Such numbers of people! Where are they all coming from? Have they not been informed that the Japanese have the lowest birthrate on Earth and are, in fact, slowly disappearing as a people? I have sat at this perch, transfixed by the rhythm of these tides, dozens of times. It is an astonishing spectacle—equal to that of noh or kabuki or bunraku, I suspect. Such a spectacle! And all for the price of a tall hotto kohi.
A MORE EXTRAVAGENT coffee experience in Tokyo is to walk down the Omote-sando to the Café Anniversaire. The Omote-sando is sometimes billed as the Champs-Élysées of Tokyo, which is a very hopeful, if ill-fitting, comparison. But to sit at one of the wicker chairs at the Café Anniversaire, however, eating a croissant and drinking a café crème, is to be transported to Paris—albeit an alternate universe Paris in which everyone is Japanese. The weather is always perfect at the Café Anniversaire. The future is always expansive, and the past is always cast in warm, soft lighting. Café Anniversaire is a romantic little luxury, and you indulge in it but once per trip and take your sweet time.
PERHAPS THE ONLY thing lovelier than enjoying a café crème in an alternate Parisian universe is engaging in the same activity in Paris itself.
Paris is as hurried and impatient as any large city. But when you set foot in a good café, though, time slows to the pace of the languid Seine. You sit with a book and a journal, and the world floats by like a cloud or an aircraft carrier.
The Italians, I would argue, are superior to the French in the art of making coffee. But for Italians, however, espresso is primarily utilitarian. It is a sort of defibrillator, a high-octane jet fuel, engineered to give the Italian populace the prodigious energy they require to speak rapidly and gesticulate forcefully all day long. Italians drink their caffeine standing up at the tabaccheria in one quick sloop! and then they are off to the races. Such behavior is not unknown to the French; but in general, they prefer to linger.
Deb Harris and I found discovered a café off the Boulevard St. Germaine in Paris one afternoon during the summer of 2001. We were leading a group of high school students on a trip through Europe, an endeavor that scarcely affords one the time to inhale, let alone savor a cup of coffee. On this day, we were (I must say) ingenious. We sent our charges off on a scenic photo scavenger hunt of the city (bon voyage!), parked our weary selves at an outdoor table, and ordered deux express, s’il vous plait!
Deb liked to dip the bottom of a sugar cube into her espresso and watch the liquid wick up the remainder of the cube. She performed a demonstration, and then popped the whole thing in her mouth like a bonbon. Émile Zola had written such and such novel at this café, she said, around the same time he was advocating on the behalf of Alfred Dreyfus. I was impressed by this historical tidbit. Of course, I had no clue what she was talking about. We finished our espresso drinks with big, dopey grins on our faces on account of our current and complete sense of liberty. Only later did I enquire, "Who was Émile Zola?"
I ENCOURAGE ANY soul with literary inclinations, a few spare dimes, and an appreciation for the culture of coffee to set aside just one week of his or her their life to flit about Paris from café to café, entertaining the notion that one is a Writer. It is a splendid fiction to indulge, in this moderation.
I did just such a thing this February in the year Anno Domini 2009. I was fresh from a month of right livelihood at the Zen community of Plum Village in the Dordogne, eager to get to work on this little writing project that I had been dreaming up for some months. At the monastery, I had the tremendous good fortune of meeting a true patron of the arts—my very own Lorenzo di Medici—the wonderful mademoiselle Maya Bron.
"You are coming to Paris?" she said one day in the dining room. "You can stay with me and my boyfriend in St Germaine-en-Laye, if you like. It is quiet and there are good walks."
I verified the seriousness of her offer and, upon so doing, quickly accepted the invitation:
"Yes, I would love to stay with you and your boyfriend in St. Germaine-en-Laye."
I had steeled myself for a week in a rattrap motel along Boulevard Port Royal. This new scenario had arrived as if upon a golden platter, held aloft by cherubs, with the choir of angels singing in accompaniment.
I fell into a routine once I had settled in to St. Germaine. I took the train into the city in the mornings, picked an arrondissement, and looked for a welcoming café. I wrote for a few hours, flopping my books and legal pads on the table in a precarious heap, sipping my café crème slowly—slowly—because there is a whole day of this ahead, and the little buggers are not cheap. When the time was right, the heap returned to my backpack, and I set off on a walk to the next café.
These walks might be more accurately described as treks. I made a point of never taking the subway. I might start at Café de la Mairie on the Place St. Sulpice and walk north, north, north all the way up to Café de Mont Cenis atop Montmartre. Around four o’clock, I took the train back to St. Germaine. Maya and I would buy vegetables and bread and cheese and wine. She cooked, or I cooked, or we both cooked; all the while we talked about psychology, farming, Corsica, and the amiable monastic hermit that she and Marco visited from time to time at his cave in the south of France.
Then Marco would come home, and we all sat on the floor around the coffee table to eat. At some point, Maya would fetch the cider, and Marco would unearth the wine his father bought in bulk some decades ago, which was now just right! Maya and Marco did not drink coffee. They drank tea. They were amused by my enthusiasm for cafés, and in one week I had undoubtedly visited more cafés than the two of them had, combined, in their many years as Parisians.
One evening, photos and stories of Marco’s grandparents’ farm on the Swiss-French border emerged, along with a bottle of his grandfather’s plum alcohol (vintage 1989. The hand-written label read a mon petit Marc-Antoine). Grandfather’s loving script to his then ten year-old grandson, along with associations I drew to the sweet, mild Japanese plum wine, did not prepare me for the full impact of this potent beverage. "A mon petit Marc-Antoine… May this alcohol cauterize your esophagus and make you blind as a tick… XOXO,xoxo Papi."
ON SOME DAYS, I did not escape the gravity of St. Germaine. The reason was the Arcade Café. The interior was pretentious, but the coffee was excellent, and the location unequaled. If it was warm enough, I sat on the arcade that overlooked St. Germaine’s perfectly -proportioned main square. As evening came, I ordered a half liter of Affligem ale that arrived in a giant goblet. The goblet required two hands to manipulate. When I returned the following evening, the waiter held his arms wide, as if carrying an invisible boulder. "Affligem, Monsieur?" There was nothing to say but oui!
Part III
MY RÉSUMÉ BOASTS one brief stint as a barista. I donned the apron in 2001-02 while I was working nights as a teaching assistant for the Harvard Extension School. I worked fifteen hours per week at the Copley Square Starbucks in downtown Boson. This is not to be confused with the Huntington Avenue Starbucks, located some eighty feet away across Dartmouth Street.
The two jobs complemented one another nicely. The Starbucks gig, with its access to unlimited free coffee, got me chemically prepared for the evening discussion sections that I facilitated. More importantly, my inability to count correct change, or remember the litany of customizations our savvy regulars had honed for their beverage of choice, served to quickly deflate any intellectual hot air I might be inflating myself with during the night shift.
I was not, at this stage of my life, so riled up about corporations taking over the universe as I am now. I did, however, fancy myself as something of a subversive within the Starbucks Empire. My monkey wrenching was modest and symbolic, but it was satisfying. It consisted mainly of surreptitiously giving out free drinks to Tor, or Lyndsay, or Kari when they would “just happen to stop by.” Most pleasingly, I would lean over the counter to enjoin customers, sotto voce, not to buy the iced latte. "Just order an espresso over ice," I would whisper, "and fill it with milk at the condiment station. It’ll save you a buck fifty."
When Starbucks announced the closure of six hundred and sixty-one stores in 2008, I secretly wondered if my bit of iced latte Robin Hooding may have contributed to the downsize.
Don’t get me wrong; there are many particulars to admire about the Starbucks Corporation. The company treats its employees quite well, in terms of salary and health insurance. And the corporate social responsibility efforts seem more genuine and focused than the cynical and ostentatious window dressing you sometimes find at large companies. What I object to is the scale, and the monotony, of it all. There are now some sixteen thousand Starbucks stores dotting the planet. Each store conforms rigidly to a prescribed style and aesthetic, whether it is located in San Francisco, Beijing, or Dubai.
A few years ago, Starbucks bought its own satellite radio station which pumps music—the same music—into all of its shops and kiosks. In my Copley Square days, the company used a stereo system that could only play a type of disk customized and manufactured specifically for Starbucks. This, of course, was to ensure a uniform ambience across cultures and time zones. Let us not leave anything to chance! is the mentality that drives this sort of codification, be it corporate or religious in nature. Life is about chance, but business is not. As an employee, I bristled at the uniformity and squelching of spontaneity. I entertained mischievous thoughts of jury-rigging the stereo setup, waiting patiently for the 7:48 morning rush, and treating our customers to a medley of Megadeath and Eazy-E.
Starbucks uses the term “the third place” to describe the environment it offers—not home, not work, but the locale where you can slide comfortably into yourself and connect with those around you.
Call me old fashioned, but I prefer my “third place” to reflect the personality and individuality of the community it purports to serve. A corporation with sixteen thousand outlets must maintain a strict consistency, and consistency at this scale must come at the expense of on-the-ground initiative and creative impulse. It also means that the bulk of customers’ dollars are steadily funneled to an eleven-storey headquarters in Seattle, Washington, as opposed to cycling back into the local economy.
I do not want Starbucks to disappear. I simply would like to see the company downsize to the extent that it can once again be a manifestation of a unique place (Seattle) instead of a generic imposition on other unique places (the rest of the world). If I were Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz for a day, how many Starbucks would I keep open? Well, certainly the original at Pike Place Market. Perhaps one or two others in the Seattle area. As for the rest, I would send a final, companywide memorandum reading:
Dear Starbucks Partners,
Thank you for your service! Tomorrow, 15,998 Starbucks locations will begin the transition to become independent, locally-owned coffee shops. Please, turn off the Starbucks Sirius FM radio station, and play whichever type of music you like—even Megadeath, if it so pleases you.
Yours Sincerely,
Howard Schultz
IT IS IRONIC, if not surprising, that I drank the worst coffee of my life while I was living not five miles from a large coffee estate. The period was 2002-03, and the place was Heredia, Costa Rica. The finca of Café Britt is located on hills that rise gradually east to the foot of Poas Volcano. There is a lovely, open-air coffee shop that accepts American dollars, and a small theater at which you can see a dramatization of Costa Rica’s illustrious coffee heritage in Spanish, English, or German. A one-pound bag of Café Britt coffee will cost you about ten dollars, roughly equivalent to what you will pay for high-end coffee in California, and more than fifty percent of the average Costa Rican’s daily income.
Down the hill at the Centro de Idiomas Intercultura, we language instructors sucked down fourth-rate coffee with powdered non-dairy creamer by the trough full. Granted, our unquenchable thirst for coffee would have sent the institute into bankruptcy within a fortnight had those controlling the purse strings bought us Café Britt. However, the broader point to be illustrated is that hardly anyone in Costa Rica can afford to drink Costa Rican coffee anymore, at least not the decent stuff.
This is one of those quaint features of globalization that somehow does not get emphasized in Utopian, “we’re all connected” advertising campaigns for Microsoft and the like. A group of expatriate language instructors having to settle for a limp cup of coffee is not exactly the height of injustice, but all over the world, farmers cannot afford to eat the very crops they grow. There is something profoundly ludicrous about this, and I hope that someday the ghost of free marketeer enthusiast Milton Friedman will explain to me just how this whole setup is supposed to benefit humanity.
Part IV
CAFÉ LA PETITE PARIS was the place to go if you wanted a good cup of coffee in Heredia. The café was a quiet refuge, with a lovely, shaded patio out back, in an otherwise hot and noisy city. It certainly did not hurt that they also carried a full lineup of Belgian beers. I had quite accustomed myself to Imperial lager, but on a Friday evening, it was nice to indulge in something a bit more invigorating to the taste buds. Thank you, Trappist monks!
What follows is an account of the event that truly endeared us to La Petite. It is the story of a pilgrimage.
A few weeks after moving to Costa Rica, my students told me about the annual pilgrimage to the city of Cartago. Each August, Costa Ricans from all over the country walk to that city’s cathedral to pay homage to La Virgin de Los Angeles. Ben’s students had relayed to him the same information. Ben was a Canadian, and he was young and full of wonder and adventure. Let’s walk to Cartago! he proposed. And so we did.
On Sunday morning, Ben and I took the bus to San Jose and set off towards Cartago. It was about fifteen miles. We walked most of the way along busy highways for fear of getting hopelessly lost on the back roads. When at length we arrived, there was not a soul at the cathedral. Metal barriers had been arranged in serpentine patterns outside as if to direct the flow of pilgrims, but now the plaza was surrendered to Ben, myself, and a few pigeons.
Must have missed it, I shrugged.
We poked wearily around the church for a few minutes, got on the bus, and headed back to San Jose.
Transferring buses in San Jose, we both stopped in front of the display window of an electronics store. All of the television sets were playing live news coverage of the pilgrimage to La Basilica de la Virgin de los Angeles. There were swarms of people on the screens. I took a closer look.
"Hey," I said pointlessly to Ben, for he saw it as clearly as I did. "That’s not the church we went to."
We were humbled, dispirited. We needed a beer—a really good beer—after this comically failed pilgrimage. We set off straight for La Petite Paris.
"Ustedes paracen muy cansados," said the waitress when we sat down. "You guys look really tired."
So we were!
"Es una historia muy larga," I replied. It’s a long story.
She looked around the empty patio. "Tengo tiempo," she said. I have time. And she sat down and introduced herself. "Yo soy Adriana."
Ben and I looked at one another. Our Spanish was nearly nonexistent at that point. We mustered our resolve and began to tell our sorry tale of pilgrimage to the second largest church in Cartago. Adriana loved every butchered word of it.
By the story’s climax, we were all thoroughly enjoying the absurdity of it. In the pilgrimage’s retelling, an odd sort of victory had been wrestled from the jaws of ineptitude. Adriana brought each of us a Leffe Brune on the house, and general frivolity ensued. There was no better place on the planet to have been that night than Café La Petite Paris.
WHEN A COFFEE shop has burrowed its way into your heart, it is nearly impossible to refrain from carrying on about it. Part of this points to one of our more admirable human qualities: we like to share the things we love. There is more at play here, though. Talking about a place brings us there momentarily, even if we happen to be an ocean away. Describing a favorite locale conjures its sights, its smells, its atmosphere, and its tastes.
Love of a coffee shop is a contagion. When transmitted, it predisposes others to feel warmly towards a place they may not have even heard of before. It is effortless to talk about a beloved coffee shop, just as I used to find it effortless to talk unceasingly about the Oakland Athletics or the Beatles catalog. Words just flow.
There are great coffee shops that have built up such love and devotion among their clientele that there is no concern of the wellspring ever going dry. Philz Coffee on 24th and Folsom in San Francisco is just such a place, and this is entirely fitting. The coffee at Philz, simply put, is in a league of its own. Blue Bottle Coffee, a few miles north with its tiny storefront on Linden Street and a constant line of devotees, is another place on its way to becoming an institution. You shower praise on these places even if they do not, strictly speaking, need it. They are already among the elect.
It is entirely different when you encounter a place like Pasha Coffee and Tea in Chattanooga. Pasha was in that category of fledgling coffee shops that show promise, but whose success, let alone survival, is by no means guaranteed. Such a place is more than just a coffee shop; it becomes a cause. These are moments in time and space when the best is called forth in a coffee connoisseur, when his enthusiasms can be channeled for the greater good.
I HAD ALREADY been living in Chattanooga for two months before Candace told me about Pasha. I was taken aback that I did not know about it yet; no one could accuse me of not having done my homework on the local coffee scene. I knew them all well: Stone Cup, Greyfriar’s, Rembrandts, Chattz, Mocha and Main, and even Coffee Grinders down by the university.
"This is a new place," Candace told me. "And it’s in St. Elmo."
That explained it.
St. Elmo is a quiet little neighborhood a few miles south of downtown, nestled at the base of Lookout Mountain. One does not go to St. Elmo by chance—the trip must be premeditated.
One fine writing morning, I biked all the way down Broad Street. I passed Martin Luther King Boulevard, passed the old foundry site, and kept going beyond the highway overpass and the strip malls. Broad Street, our garrulous host at the Moccasin Bend Brewery told Pete, Katie, and me one Sunday afternoon, had once been an old railway line. Chattanooga wanted to pull up the tracks and put in a road. Not so fast, said the state of Georgia, who to this day argues that the area falls within its state lines. Chattanooga Mayor Edward David Bass took matters into his own hands and personally led a team of bulldozers in the dead of night to tear up the tracks and cement his place in local lore. A subsequent fact check revealed that our bartender had erred in many of her particulars, but she captured the spirit of events perfectly.
Broad Street, thanks to Mayor Bass, now terminates at the base of Lookout Mountain. I followed it south until Tennessee Avenue and then hung a left. Tennessee Avenue crosshatches with St. Elmo Avenue, and their intersection represents what was once an independent downtown before the same bulldozing mayor annexed St. Elmo in 1929.
Downtown St. Elmo is not so much sleepy as it is—very literally—moribund. A large percentage of local businesses cater to visitors of nearby Forest Hills Cemetery. All of this is a long way of saying that Pasha Coffee and Tea had its work cut out for it in drawing much of a following.
I parked my bike, stepped inside the shop, and approvingly scanned the interior: soft-hued woods, good local art, and well-arranged, comfortable furniture. I ordered a dark roast, and the barista handed me a brimming soup bowl of it. I doctored the drink with cream and sugar, and then sat down for the moment of truth.
The coffee was—in a word—sublime.
Energized by this exquisite beverage and the exciting new locale, the writing came easily that morning. I worked on the farm the next few days, but as soon as my next writing morning came along, I was back in St. Elmo. It fast became a routine.
Pasha was first-class, with the best coffee in town, but I was worried about its longevity. Customers were few and far between. It was simply too geographically isolated, too improbable of a little gem hidden within that leafy funeral district.
So, I ratcheted up my advocacy.
I took Noah there one day, fifteen minutes out of our way en route to Matt Sears’ carpentry shop. I pitched Pasha’s to Laurie, Jim, Katie, Eleanor, and others. I scheduled meetings there, and chatted about Pasha with anyone who would listen. I befriended Or and Ladonna, the young owners, and urged them to link up with local farmers and tap into the growing momentum of the local food movement.
Or certainly knew his coffee. His face lit up when he talked about the roasting process, the intricacies of Turkish coffee, or the sweet pleasure of the morning’s first robust cup. He had been honing his craft for years at home while working as a computer technician. Pasha was his and Ladonna’s big leap.
"You Turks are pretty serious about coffee," I said to him one day.
"You bet we are."
"I was at a wedding last week, and the groom’s dad was born in Turkey. He came to our table during the reception, and we all started talking about Turkish coffee."
"No surprise there," Or said.
"My friend didn’t know the particulars, so I started to explain as best I could. 'Well, it’s a very fine grind, and you bring water to a boil with the grinds several times,' and Taner’s dad is nodding his head, nodding his head. So I go on, “and you put cardamom in it…'”
"…Oh no. You didn’t say that."
"I did!"
"Uh oh."
"...and Taner’s dad slams his hand on the table and says, 'No! No, no, no. You do not put the cardamom. In Lebanon, in Syria…they put the cardamom because…'"
"…because they use lousy beans."
"You know the line, then!"
"Oh yeah," Or was laughing, "we all know the line. Don’t insinuate to a Turk that he needs a spice to prop up the taste of his coffee. You’re liable to get hurt if you say something like that."
"Oh, I figured that out."
"It sounds like you did!"
IT IS ONLY fitting that I pen these last lines at the House That Morgan built, the old stone Herald building on Abrego and Pearl where the East Village Coffee Lounge has taken on the mantle of downtown Monterey’s most beloved coffee establishment. It is nine in the evening on a Wednesday. A fire winds itself down in the fireplace, and acoustic guitar filters in from the open-mic night in the back room. The lighting is a warm amber.
HOW CAN YOU pay almost two dollars for a cup of coffee? I have been asked by a friend who does not understand such things.
I am not buying coffee, I explained. I am paying rent.
WHERE CAN YOU be both participant and observer? Where can you be both visible and invisible? The coffee shop is a pair of bifocals that enables you to see both the forest and the trees. It is a place where one can slip fluidly between the inner life and the outer. It is a blessed domain where individual and society are reconciled.
CLOSING TIME. THE chairs are going up on the tables, the amber lights dimmed. Circadian rhythm holds sway here, there, everywhere. The coffee shop at rest.
