If Leonard Pinth-Garnell Owned a Coffee House ...

Cafe Society
1

There’s a new coffee house in the neighborhood where I work.

I decided to give it a try this morning. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was that there were only three things in the pastry case.* (my real ulterior motive here was “New Exciting Pastry Reconaissance.”)

I said, “Is that a scone there?”
Yes, the guy said.
I’ll take that, please, and a large house coffee with room for cream.

Okay, those two things came to over six bucks. Sadly, not out of the normal range of coffee house prices around here. The coffee, however, was self-serve.

So I go to a table in the spacious room. At 11 am, I am the only person in there.
The next thing I noticed was that there were nicely framed pictures all over the walls, but they were not art. Neither were they the glossy photographs of tasty pastries you sometimes see in doughnut shops.

No, they were really ugly watercolors of things like cookies and kitchen utensils. Disturbingly ugly.

I sit down, turn on my kindle, and start reading a new SF anthology I have just bought. A kinda cool old blues song starts playing, and after a minute my toe starts tapping.

The music suddenly stops.
A different song by a completely different person is put on, but it’s not quite loud enough to really hear. However, it vaguely suggests a nice little polyrhythm, and in a minute my toe is tapping gently again.

The music suddenly stops.
The next song to be put on is a Joy Division song. --Hey, it’s my*** favorite*** Joy Division song! **

I didn’t dare move in time or sing along, because I *like *that song.
10 seconds into the song, I realize that it is not the studio version, it’s a live version. It is in fact the worst live version of that song I have ever heard.

I sighed, and bit into my lovely scone.

I looooove scones! There is a place in Alameda that makes scones with fresh blackberries in the middle, during the summer. One of those is the quickest way to my heart.
I love currant scones, and I’ve had good cranberry scones.
I know another bakery in Emeryville that makes scones with cornmeal in the batter, and fresh cherries mixed in. They are delicious.

What flavor is this scone from the exciting new coffee shop?

I bit into it…

It is a savory scone. A what? Yes. It had exceptionally salty chopped sun-dried tomatoes in it.

Maybe I’m missing something here. Is there such a thing as an ironic coffee house?

  • The other two were cookies.

** “Transmission.”

2

I had completely forgotten Leonard Pinth-Garnell until I started watching some classic SNL again a couple weeks ago…

3

I recalled the name, I knew it was Dan, but I couldn’t remember the character…until mid-way through the story, when it blossomed. :stuck_out_tongue:

4

I gather from this that you’re saying they managed to screw up the decor, music, and pastry. That leaves only 2 categories to excel in. How was the coffee and how cute was the server? Plus points if she’s wearing something low cut.

5

Was there a note on the counter that said, “Open your mouth! Also shut up! Get out!” ?

6

Did you burn your tongue?

7

Ha ha, I almost titled this thread, “Coffee of Doom,” until I realized that it wouldn’t convey anything near the proper sense of hopeless futility.

I’m saying that my Coffee Experience didn’t fall from grace – it was pushed!
The level of sabotage almost put it into the category of performance art.

The coffee was okay; a bit thin, but for $4.00, I think that they could jolly well have at least filled the cup for me.
The server was a nice young gay man. I’m a female unit, so even if he had been wearing something low-cut, I don’t think it would have made a difference.

8

Well no; but the über-salty sundried tomato hunks in the hallowed scone produced such profound cognitive dissonance that I actually couldn’t identify it.

9

Well, you certainly had yourself a Coffee Experience. Look on the good side… If you brought your laptop or tablet with you to use their WiFi, they’d probably had hacked into it.

10

Coffee of Doom’s pastries got a lot better after the owner broke up with her boyfriend

11

BAD COFFEE HOUSE

Come by this weekend for your listening pleasure, starting at 6pm, BAD SINGER SONGWRITER.

12

When you’re sick of Coffee of Doom, you’ll have to stop by The Excruciatingly Hip Coffee Joint that my daughter and I found.

You’ll love the “servers” who wear nearly-identical plaid wool shirts and Tibetan scarves in August, and the way they sneer when you don’t know which bean you want and (gasp) don’t have a preference of how you want it ground.

Then they ignore you as they do a slowwww “pour over”, one of them watching a timer and occasionally stopping the other who’s monitoring a thermometer and fine-tuning the water temperature. My favorite line of theirs? “Excuse me, sir, could you please find a seat while we create this? We need to concentrate.”

I thought my no-nonsense daughter was going to explode with pent-up laughter, but she kept it in til we finally got our Utterly Perfect Coffee and beat a hasty retreat.

13

A friend of my husband’s told the tale of visiting some friends of his in New Zealand. They offered him a homemade muffin with his tea. Mmmm! Muffin! Muffins, in general, tend to be sweet, right? Turns out this one was a Brie and Broccoli muffin, which he didn’t know until he bit into it. Makes me laugh every time I think of him telling the story.

14

Coffee snobs make wine snobs look rational.

Modernist Cuisine was shockingly dismissive about wine, and seemingly set out to cause wine snobs to have aneurisms with their advice to “hyper-decant” wines in a blender. But then they devoted thirty pages to coffee and an essay about the perfect cup of espresso, the so-called “God shot” that will, apparently, cure cancer.

15

To be fair, a broccoli-and-brie muffin would be really good, so long as you bit in knowing what to expect.

16

I see you have visited Austin

Capt

17

Wow, these are great responses! Big fun for me catching up tonight.

Digs: If I didn’t know you were serious, I’d never believe you weren’t joking!! Sounds like your local coffee czars have raised “frou-frou” to an art form. (or else invented the new sport of Recreational Effete Silliness.)

Ranger Jeff: Ah! You are undoubtedly correct!

kath94: Exactly!! I totally feel his pain! Chronos is right, brie and broccoli are a winning combination – hell, I love sundried tomatoes too, in the right context – but why do these people want to corrupt a perfectly wonderful sweet treat with incongruous savories? It’s like a meat-filled danish or something. Why not broccoli-brie brioche? Sundried tomato bruschetta? Seriously.

gaffa: *** “Godshot?”*** Seriously? Bwa-ha-ha-ha-haaa!

But I guess coffee snobbery is on the upswing. I recently read a book by one of my favorite SF authors, Cory Doctorow — it’s a YA book, no less — and he spent 3 or 4 pages waxing poetic and giving forth an impassioned paean to** cold-brewed coffee.**

I don’t get these people who think all coffee is “bitter.” Always makes me think “U’re not doing it rite.”

18

From Modernist Cuisine:

19

A friend of mine is like this - on the plus side, his coffee is good; I was a resolute tea person before his concoctions.

But coffee snobs can be weird. We’ve got a tiny indie place near me - awful decor, crazy prices, lousy pastries, hipster staff. You have to read thru these lengthy descriptions on blends before you order, after which they take about 10 minutes making you drink. I found an Ethiopian one that sounded decent and ordered a large.

“We don’t sell that in a large, just small or medium.”

The air of finality was hilarious. Like it was impossible. Like the process was somehow more involved than “grab a large cup and when you get to the point where you usually stop for a medium, keep pouring; charge a bit more.”

I took the medium, but it was a funny little stand-off. I’m sure they could see by my expression that I thought that was odd, maybe a bit stupid. The barista had this resigned air, like he was gearing up to explain this to yet another Starbucks philistine, then seemed to grow a bit aggravated when I didn’t ask why or protest. I imagine it was like wearing mismatched shoes because of some catastrophe at home. You go out thinking you’ll be explaining it all day, but while everyone notices no one says anything, and you realize that they don’t think that’s weird - they think you’re weird, so in their minds this is par for the course.

20

Oh, this is awesome! --And here I thought I was the only one who found all this coffee mystique pretentious and funny!

epbrown01: “We don’t sell that in a large.” Okay, give me two mediums and a large cup, please. Jeez, what could their reason possibly be?

gaffa: “A double shot, drunk neat.” Oh, I’ll remember that. Wouldn’t want to look foolish among the coffee literati.

Recipe: Go to Excruciatingly Hip coffee. Order a double shot neat, to go. Then go to the bar, and order a double shot neat, to go. Take them home, put them together, add cream and sugar, and you’ve got Irish Coffee.