Origin stories are important. My coffee journey started when I was six years old, when my Nana Ward served me cold milk with coffee-flavored syrup. It was not love at first taste. I became a dedicated coffee drinker at 23, and it was simple black coffee with half-and-half. I always hated the thimble-sized milk containers at convenience stores called "moos," so I learned to take my coffee black. I grew up outside of Boston, where I drank Dunkin' Donuts coffee - just cream, no sugar. At the time, a regular coffee in Boston was always light and sweet. I had my first cappuccino in my mid-twenties as part of the dessert course at a "fancy" restaurant. I didn't know exactly what it was, but the restaurant served the cappuccino with a stir stick covered in rock candy. I thought that was cool.
At 31, I walked into a Starbucks in Westport, CT, got a black coffee, hated it, and hated the chaos that was Starbucks at 8:00 AM on a weekday morning. Waiting 10 minutes for a coffee while people placed what I thought were overly complex coffee orders; it seemed ridiculous at the time.
While working in the corporate world, I drank six cups of coffee each day, much more than I drink today. Coffee was a way to cut boredom. But the coffee in the office was never particularly good. It could be sweet, it could be weak, it could be old, it could be cold, but it could never be "good." In the coffee shop, there is always something to keep me busy; boredom is never an issue. Plus, good coffee satiates the appetite for more coffee. I am stealing this belief from what I have read about chocolate. There are theories that higher-quality chocolate is more satisfying and that less chocolate scratches the itch better than a larger quantity of inferior chocolate. Most mornings, I just enjoy a cortado and don't go back for seconds.
My coffee shop reflects my interests. If I must be here (and I must), I want a place that I love visiting. Many coffee houses strive for a minimalist aesthetic. This makes perfect sense; most patrons want an Instagrammable neon sign or angel wings painted on the wall. I went the other direction and, following my worst inclination, I keep adding things.
I have a collection of old radios, and I mean tube radios that you tune by turning a knob, hearing static until you hit just the right spot on the dial. Two of the radios are shortwave receivers, the same model but separated by 17 years, so one is a tube radio, and the other is a transistor radio. I love that these two radios demonstrate an advance in technology. All but two of my radios are Zeniths. This is unintentional.
I display my radios on a high shelf above the counter: look, but don't touch. People can be inadvertently rough with older objects. My personal books fill the large bookshelf on the south end of the shop. The books cover math, history, economics, a half-dozen scholarly religious works, essays, the complete works of Shakespeare, poetry, and novels, including a small collection of John Irving and Tom Wolfe. I have two portable typewriters on the top of the bookshelf, out of the reach of children and adults alike, who sometimes think typing means pushing all the keys at once.
My plants are another matter. I have forty-plus, which I care for with the same industriousness a subsistence farmer would devote to a food crop during a famine. People have encouraged me to get fake plants, but that feels a like cheating. There is something rewarding about maintaining living plants that I cannot get from dusting silk flowers.
My goal has been to make the coffee shop a place where, if you look around, you might see something that reminds you of another time or place. I am nostalgic, but not yearning for an earlier time. My nostalgia is an admiration for the way people communicated, learned, listened, and accomplished great tasks with vastly different tools. I typed papers on an electric typewriter and couldn't imagine doing it on a manual one. Now that I have a personal computer, I would never consider using an electric typewriter. Today, when there is an app for everything and AI for almost anything else, I wanted to create a space where, when you look at something, it might inspire you to ask, "What is that?" What is better than enjoying a coffee in a comfortable chair and rediscovering your curiosity?
Part Two - Why a coffee shop?