S n a r k A t t a c k

Don't Treat Me Like That

Last night I had dinner at NOPA.  Nopa is a fancyish newish restaurant on Divisadero and Hayes, right across from Popeye's Chicken, the last a particularly charming effect when you emerge from your fancy meal and are hit by a hammer of deep fried chicken fumes. 

Nopa is supposed to be some testament to the gentrification of that area which, to my thinking, isn't exactly north of the Panhandle.  It's more east of it, but then I suppose that Eapa doesn't have quite the same zing and sounds instead more like a government branch or something you might say after the freaking waiter tells you that no, you're the idiot because everyone LOVES our insanely bitter and overextracted espresso.  But more on that later.

I used to live in Nopa, but then I just called it the Lower Haight and was done with it.  I also would agree with it being the Divisadero Corridor, or sometimes, if I was trying to make it sound fancy, Alamo Square (home of the Painted Ladies and thus, frequently visited by tour buses disgorging German and Japanese tourists to take snaps).  This was about eight years ago when I first moved to SF proper after law school.  As I had the pup with me, finding an apartment was nearly impossible and so I was stuck with an apartment in one of those oddly hacked up Victorians.  Large, but somehow unusable kitchen, Overlook-Hotel-like corridors, a tiny closet of a bedroom and a bathroom in two parts.  It was also on a not-great part of Scott Street that made me nervous.

I could bear the terrible parking and the tap dancing of my upstairs neighbor, but taking the dog out late made me nervous.  The final straw was when I took her to nearby Alamo Square and one of the neighbors' Akitas attacked her.  The pup seemed okay, if a little exhilarated, and the neighbor, a slovenly woman who was apparently used to her dog attacking other dogs, got in MY face.

She started poking her finger at me and yelled, "My dog didn't do anything, how dare you, etc." and she got so exercised that her finger actually made contact with my sternum.  At this moment she seemed to understand that she'd crossed a line.  Suddenly it wasn't about the dog's behavior, but about hers.  The approach was still the same:  it was my fault she'd poked me in the chest.  "I didn't touch you -" I had to stop her.  "Uh, you just touched me.  And your dog attacked mine.  But she seems to be okay - "  I had no intention of getting into it with this woman, the pup did seem fine and I'd be happy never to have any more dealings with this person until she said something that me and my big mouth could not resist. Let's listen in, shall we?

Neighbor:   My dog didn't do anything!  Your dog is fine -
Me:  Yeah, she seems to be but let me just look -

I tried to look at the pup but the woman was so in my face that I couldn't get to her.  As I'm stooping down to examine the pup, the woman says:

Neighbor:  What?  (defensively)  You want to go to the SPCA?  Huh?
Me:  Why?  Are you sick?

Yeah.  The air pretty much left the surrounding neighborhoods at this point. I thought, this is it.  If she's got a knife, I'm going to be killed.  Right here.  And you know what?  It was one of those things where if I HADN'T said it, I would have regretted it.  Dead, all for the sake of a great line.   

Eh.  I'll take it.   (Note, that if she were REALLY scary, I would have just picked up the 60 pound dog and run as far and as fast as my little legs could take me.  Which would have been one half-block.  To safety.  Sigh.)

As for NOPA, let's just say this.  What is it with customer service these days that when you complain about something, they now argue with you?   My date had been a barista. As you all know, I am addicted to coffee. We are two people particularly well-suited to determining whether an espresso does not taste right.  After a valiant attempt to doctor it up to make it drinkable, she sent it back.  The waiter said something like, "Really?  People actually rave about our espresso."  My thought was why is he saying this?  Like that's going to make it taste better now?  Oh, I had no idea!  Sorry, sir!  I didn't realize that this particular espresso was pre-ordained to be amazing because the sheep who only have espresso when it's been dumped into twelve ounces of whole milk and then topped off with a squirt of caramel and some whipped cream and then two packets of Splenda (because they're watching their waists) seem to love it.    How should I feel about the tip that I'm going to leave you?  Because the other waiters I've had?  They've RAVED about it.

But then there was the second espresso.  Also bad.  In fact, I'm still trying to cleanse my palate of it - overextracted, bitter, undrinkable.  I had gone to the restroom at this point but when I returned, my date told me that the manager had come over. Same thing: everyone LOVES our espresso.  I don't know who these people are but I think it's so inspiring that so many people who have experienced near-fatal tastebud injuries manage to live such full lives.  Good for you.

Again, though, what's with this trend of criticizing the customer?  When did that become okay?

As for the rest of the meal, it was merely all right.  I like to think I'm a pretty good customer:  I'm considerate of the waitstaff, don't ask for ridiculous substitutions, try to order in a way that doesn't make them make unnecessary trips and so forth.  I asked the waiter what their signature dish was and he said that while they don't really have one, that the pork chop is the one dish that everyone seems to love.  (This should have been my first clue.)  I ordered the chop.  It was a chop.  It was a plain, rather unremarkable chop, nothing to write home about, chop.  The rest of the meal was pretty much along those lines:  a cucumber salad, good but not remarkable - and if you say, what can be remarkable about a cucumber salad?  I'll say, I had one two months ago, and it was memorable:  cucumber, fresh red onion slices, feta, heirloom tomatoes and watermelon.  I still think of it.  Fondly.   There was also a baked goat cheese app that came in a ramekin with some toast.  Good, but basically what it was, was all it was. 

I should also note that as we sat down the host brought us an amuse bouche which seemed like a joke among the kitchen staff:  two tiny radishes, a triangle of butter and a small salt cellar.  Yeah, I was just as puzzled as you are.

I will say, however, that the sazerac I had was phenomenal, which makes me wonder if perhaps the only reason to head back to Nopa is to sit at the bar, have a drink - by all accounts their cocktails are their strength - and maybe share some lamb riblets (the one thing on the menu that's worth getting again).  Barring that, there's always Popeye's.

American Pie

The House of Pies is my muse.

Like I've said, I'm not particularly good at the whole writing-in-cafes thing.  Never been quite able to swing it as I take a Book of Matthew attitude towards it. There's just something a little showy about it.  "Look, everybody:  I'm WRITING!  With words and everything!"  Plus, and I don't know if it's just the cafes I've visited, but the people there who are ostensibly there to work aren't actually working, which distresses my internal hall monitor which in turn gets me wondering about what exactly it is they're doing there if they're not working, unless 'working' for them includes obsessively checking their emails and having hours-long IM conversations.  At that point, since I'm already irrevocably distracted from my own Very Important Business, I figure that I might as well check my own email and hey, while I'm at it, I really should see if there's anything new on Boing Boing.  And Kottke.  Any maybe Waiterrant.  Two hours later, nothing's been written, the coffee is gone and I need to go to the bathroom and I'm not leaving it in the care of these layabouts.  May as well go home.  Thus, cafes do not work for me.
 

That and I find that too much time spent in cafes leads to an increase in scenes like this, finding themselves in my scripts:

INT.  CAFE.  DAY.

An attractive Latina, mid-30's, sits hunched over a tiny laptop in a busy cafe, a half-eaten bagel resting atop a cheap notebook filled with scrawls.  She scans the room and starts to type furiously.  We ZOOM in to see what she's written.  Her screen reveals a Typepad interface.  She's writing a blog entry.

                                                                                                           CUT TO:                                                                                                          
CLOSEUP.  COMPUTER SCREEN.

"Like I've said, I'm not particularly good at the whole writing-in-cafes thing."

Seriously, while the cafes do nothing for me lately, I've recently fallen deeply into smit with the House of Pies.  First of all, it's a diner.  Secondly, pies.  Thirdly, free refills of diner coffee.  It's never so busy that you feel weird about sitting at a table for a couple of hours and did I mention?  They have pies!  My new love has prompted a discussion among my friends (or shall I say "friends"?) about pie versus cake.  I am in this respect catholic in my tastes.  When pressed, I will admit a preference to dogs over cats, to wine over beer, to Fromage D'affinoise over cheddar.  But in the entire pie versus cake debate, I will say only that I like them both but that when you're at the House of Pies, you will have the pie and you will love it.

So after a long day when I realize I haven't actually left the house save for a quick spin around the block to relieve the dog, I've been going to the House of Pies where I get an astonishing amount of work done.  I don't know if it's the atmosphere, the blueberry pie, the eight coffee refills or the fact that I'm laptop-free when I'm there, but I get it done at the House of Pies.

I'm just so happy that I joined a gym before I discovered this.

Oh, and while I've practically written books about my love of good coffee and my displeasure at getting bad coffee, the exception is diner coffee.  Don't know why but when the woman serving it calls you "Hon" and asks, every 10 minutes, if you'd like more coffee - if she brings you an entirely new cup of coffee once yours has gotten cold - it is officially exempted from my insistence on Peets-like quality.  And speaking of less-than-Peets-quality coffee, I must insist that you check out my favorite new commercial for a product I'll never buy. 

Ojala Que Llueve Cafe

As I was driving from SF to LA yesterday, a drive I can probably now do in my sleep, I was totally digging the albums I had in the changer:  Pulp, Common People; The Decemberists, Picaresque; We Are Scientists, With Love and Squalor; and The Like, Are You Thinking What I'm Thinking?  Really, the only one you can sing along to is We Are Scientists' With Love and Squalor, but after two hours singing about waking up on people's floors gets a little old. By Bakersfield, you need a bit of the menthol relief of the Decemberists, the musical equivalent of Ira Glass: you feel good listening to it, but also smarter.  And maybe a little smug. 

As I was contemplating life at 85mph, I thought back to my delicious, delicious coffee experiences in SF.

See, SF is leading the way for hand-made coffee, which is to say, cup-at-a-time coffee. Blue Bottle is perhaps the most famous in SF, nestled in a garage in Hayes Valley where some coffee shaman creates gorgeous cappuccinos while you wonder what you did in a previous life to deserve such caffeinated riches.  It's that good.

Happily, they also have a stand at the Farmer's Market at the Ferry Building which is where I tried their gold standard:  the cup of coffee.  I know it sounds common and plain but the cup of coffee is what the pasta aglia olio is to Italian restaurants or what the tamago is to a sushi joint:  the seemingly simple but nearly-impossible-to-perfect dish, which tells you whether this is a place worth standing in line for. 

The coffee was divine.  It takes a while, as each cup is made individually and dripped into your cup.  (Well, MY cup in this case.)  Two bucks, which is a lot for a plain ol' cup of joe but then again, it was transformative.  And as such, a bargain.  To find out why each cup is so yummy, check out their directions for making a great cup of drip coffee:  it's all here.

Later during my stay I tried Philz Coffee in the Castro, which also does the handmade/cup-at-a-time coffee and which I'd eschewed previously because the name is asinine.  I am a judgmental whore, fine.  But Philz?  Where is the value added in not using the proper apostrophe S?  Really.  I ask you.

But then it was a warm day in SF and I was craving caffeine and free internet and found both at Phil's (ahem). 

I am not a flavored coffee kind of girl.  When I'm visiting with my folks, I wait until my early rising mother's had her coffee and when she's done with the pot I scrub the  pot until there are no traces of the hazelnut or vanilla or lord help us - Irish mint - DECAF coffee which she favors.  However, Philz adds real spices to its coffee, which is how I discovered why an iced coffee made with a bit of cardamom and decorated with a sprig of mint is exactly what you need to stay awake for the next week.  And look good while doing it.  Plus, the chick behind the counter was so cute and enthusiastic and just jazzed to be making MY cup of coffee that you couldn't help but be a little excited about the coffee you were about to consume.  And then it was, in fact, perfect.  Bright with a cardamom finish, almost tea-like. 

I'm not sure if the handmade coffee craze will make its way to LA.  Something tells me not, but then again, hope springs eternal.

Where Is My Mind

Let me do you a favor.

Skip the Da Vinci Code. 

Listen, I read the book.  Like everyone else, I hated the prose while loving the addictive plot.  The very definition of a page-turner.  The movie, however, sucked all the fun out of the treasure hunt, through bad music, too-long scenes and strange special effects.  Ron Howard trotted out the same special effects from A Beautiful Mind in order to show how Tom Hanks was figuring out various clues - he sees holograms!  He's got a photogenic memory!  Look how he's 'remembering' stuff from earlier scenes that you slept through! 

Sad when such a fun romp of a book gets translated into such a plodding mess of a movie. 

In other news, the other night I brought this lovely bottle of petite sirah over to a friend's house to enjoy while we watched the Pistons/Cav game on his ginormous t.v.  He's handy, see, and built much of the furniture in his apartment including a bar which has a built-in corkscrew.  The corkscrew has long flummoxed me because you have to hold the bottle under the corkscrew and hold it still while pulling down the lever.  I was determined not to let it break me and thus I found myself kneeling next to the corkscrew, holding the wine bottle tightly while pulling down the lever.  Instead of a nice smooth uncorking, I was greeted by a geyser of petite sirah as the cork was plunged into the bottle. 

Gentle Reader, I got petite sirah in my hair.  And all over the bar.  And, as we later discovered, all over the wall and on a painting.  It looked like CSI in there.  Luckily the walls were already red and the painting was abstract (with a lot of red in it).

T, resplendent in a white oxford, was thankful that at least none of it got on his shirt.  He took the bottle away from me and into the kitchen.

"Whatcha doing?"
"You'll see."
He began rifling through his kitchen drawers.
"You gonna get a skewer or something?"
"Maybe."

T's a big guy and with his back to me I still knew exactly what he was doing and the moment he did it, for petite sirah geyser #2 flew upward, all over the white kitchen cabinets, appliances and - T's white shirt.  He turned around.  It looked like he'd been in a knife fight.

Once we had wrung out the shirt, however, the wine was delicious. 

Bright Future in Sales

This weekend found me helping my friend J's family pour their wine at the Paso Robles wine festival.  It is the largest outdoor wine festival in California, according to the website, but really, all you need to know is that it was awesome and that there was a little bit of payback involved. 

As you doubtless know (either firsthand or through my endless recounting of personal humilations via this site), every year I attend ZAP at Fort Mason.  Two giant pavillions filled with wineries pouring their most potent zinfandels, all hovering at some 17% alcohol.  Despite all efforts to maintain an even keel, by 4pm everyone's teeth are purple, speech is slurry and all remaining energy is spent trying to get as far away from the parking lot before the out-of-towners get behind the wheel of their ancient Volvos.  Worst, and I've been guilty of this, is the vain attempt to sound as smart at 3:30 as you did at 1pm.  1pm is:  "Oh, only five thousand cases?  Really?  That is a small production.  This is the barrel sample?  And when will that be bottled?"  3:30pm is a mass Courtney Love impression where the only intelligible words are something like "Me want wine!  Me want wine!  An-im-al!  An-im-al!"      

Okay, it's not that bad, but towards the end of the day, we continue to try to sound interested in each winery and their particular technique for producing the ounce of wine we're currently swirling in our grubby little glasses.  At this point, we couldn't care less, really, and even if we do still care, we have the look of my dog when I discuss Mideast politics:  she wants to be interested but really, I'm just eating up all her ass-sniffing time. That or she knows I have no idea what I'm talking about.

This weekend I found out what it's like to be on the other side of the equation.  At best it's like helping genuinely interested people discover some amazing new wines.  At worst, it's like being a mama bird feeding a bunch of drunken chicks, mouths agape, glasses thrust forward, all clamoring for more.  Sadly, they weren't all chicks.  We got a lot of drunken guys later in the day, more amusing than anything else. 

Have you met Eric?  Eric's a nice guy but he's had way too much wine and too much sun and apparently nothing to eat.  He's wavering before me, gently swaying back and forth to a rhythm all his own. 

He holds out his hand. "Hi, I'm Eric."  I take his hand, but he doesn't let go, instead fixing me with I can only imagine is what HE thinks is his best, most intense, most successful panty-removing look.  "Are you married?" he asks, still swaying.  "Nope."  He continues to stare.  "And I still don't have a shot, do I?"  "Nope.  But have you tried our Syrah?"

And on it went.  The highlights included winemakers coming from other booths who had been told by other winemakers to try our wine.  No pun intended, but midway through the festival, the overserved aside, we got some amazing buzz.  Soon festival goers were coming up to us in droves saying they were told to try our petite sirah, that they could not miss our cab/syrah blend, etc.  Good, good, great. 

I was a little nervous about serving, thinking that I'd forget the descriptions of each wine or that I would pull a Robert Carlyle impression from Trainspotting and attack someone with a glass after they asked me for the umpteenth time to "pour me a white - any white."  (We don't have any whites.)   But it was surprisingly easy - mostly because the wine is just so good.  All of us pouring genuinely love the wine and I think that passion came across.  We're fans, and the people can tell that we're not making it up.

As for the drunks and the guys who couldn't take no for an answer and the weirdos who only wanted white wines, you just have to take all of that in stride. 

Did I mention the guy who threw up and then fell in it?  No?  (And yes, I agree: the karmic wheel does have a tight turning radius, indeed.)

In the meantime, try our petite sirah.  It's a gold medal winner...

Ain't No Sunshine

So, the coffee-free life lasted until about 5:30pm yesterday, meaning I went without caffeine for roughly 29 hours until my eyes refused to focus and my head's throbbing pain became intolerable.  Really though, it was the inability to focus that got me spooked and yet through that I managed the strength to Google 'caffeine withdrawal' in order to see exactly what I was up against.

Alarming.

Apparently researchers think that caffeine withdrawal has such a profound impact on daily activities that it should be characterized as a disorder:

Results of the Johns Hopkins study should result in caffeine withdrawal being included in the next edition of the DSM or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, considered the bible of mental disorders, and the diagnosis should be updated in the World Health Organization's ICD, or The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems.

It gets worse when you start getting into the 'clusters' of effects of withdrawal:

• Headache, the most common symptom, which affects at least of 50% of people in caffeine withdrawal
• Fatigue or drowsiness
• "Unhappy" mood, depression, or irritability
• Difficulty concentrating
• Flu-like symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, muscle pain, and stiffness.

Frankly, I'm the kind of gal who rarely gets headaches so yesterday's was especially mood-altering, and the 'fatigue or drowsiness' symptom seems to fall in the No Shit, Sherlock category.  Come to think of it, this category should also include the "unhappy mood/depression/irritability" group of symptoms because without coffee, where is the happy? I tell you: stuck in a bean that has yet to be ground and then doused with filtered water before it goes merrily down my gullet, warming body and soul.  Sigh.

I do still have to cut back though.  I was telling my brother something similar had happened when I was in college.  I'd spent the year in Spain during my junior year and the only thing Spaniards love more than clapping and smoking is coffee, so we had a cafe solo practically every two hours, just to keep up with the Ramirezes, ?sabes?  Cut to my senior year and there I am, brewing and then drinking an entire pot of coffee at 10pm every night.  I felt fine for a while until it was as if the caffeine had accumulated in my joints.  Every morning I did a Tin Man routine until I made it safely to Caffe Strada and my beloved giant cappuccino.  Sigh. 

Needless to say, that much coffee cannot be good for the system, let alone your wallet, so I scaled back.  I can't remember how I did it but I have to think it was done wisely and not in the dumbass cold turkey way I did yesterday. 

As God is my witness, I shall start buying decaf beans and yea, shall I mix said beans into a caf/decaf blend until I have achieved equal footing with power of caffeine.  You shall not tower over me, you sexy little molecule.  Instead, one day we will be not predator and prey, nor white tiger and weird German guy.  Instead my hope is that a truce of sorts will be achieved.  We will be, at last:  wary friends. 

But with benefits.

Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth

I have decided, once again, to try to rid myself of this coffee addiction.  I'd write more, but I'm too busy figuring out if my skin is on inside-out or if this is just a delightful side-effect of the withdrawal.  And the headache?  Just kicked in. 

So why, you may ask, go through it? 

Because my dependence has grown to such an extent that I will either have to buy my very own Peets franchise (or Colombia) to keep up with my growing demand, or go off of it for a few days in the vain hope that I might ratchet down my baseline daily requirement to something more managable.  Like four cups.  OVER THE ENTIRE DAY. 

This had better work.  Three days.  I give myself three days.

Whiner's Bio

Crap.

All that talk about SF just made me more homesick than ever.

Let's change the subject, shall we? 

This evening finds our heroine esconced at a coffee shop on Vermont:  It's a Grind.  Again, rumored to be excellent but every time I've come here something has been woefully off.  This time it was the guy mishearing me when I say iced americano, so he tries to fix things by not making me an actual iced americano but by taking the giant, steaming and already over-watered americano and dumping it into a plastic cup full of that kernel-type ice that's simply a hoot if you're in an ice chewing mood but which has an unfavorable surface area-to-mass ratio if you're pouring a near-boiling liquid over it:  coffee hits ice and ice melts instantly, rendering my americano the color of a weak tea.  Here you go.  (Ma'am was STRONGLY implied as he said it.)

I dread this.  I am not conflict-averse, per se, but I am not in a conflicty mood and here goes this - this COFFEE GUY telling me that a watery mess, this former americano, this pale brown liquid which looks exactly like what happens when you leave your empty cup of soda in the cup holder and then park the car in Arizona for two hours, that THIS is worth $2.10.  But look, he says, you get all this - at which he grandly points out the half full cup of steaming americano which didn't fit into the cup of ice.   You get extra, see?   

No, I say, that - that won't taste like anything.  It's all water... You're supposed to pour the espresso on top of the ice and THEN add some water if necessary.  I found myself rendered into a sputtering, inarticulate sociopath, clutching my computer in one hand and sanity in the other.  Newsflash:  If I drop anything, it will not be the computer.  I don't mind telling the guy to remake it - I don't.  What bothers me is that he clearly had no concept of what an americano, iced or otherwise, was supposed to taste like.  He pours one brown liquid into this cup or that one, maybe adds some whipped cream to that one.   What's it to him? 

Maybe I should switch to decaf.  I'm much too invested in this. 

(But where is the pride, people?  Where is the PRIDE?)

Get Down Girl, Go Ahead, Get Down

I marvel at the resilience of capsaicin on the tips of fingers which have been obsessively scrubbed dozens of times between the consumption of a jalapeno and the removal of contact lenses.  Thus, the screaming.

Some might wonder, why a jalapeno?  To which I respond emphatically - because. 

It's not a question of genetics, though that's the easy response:  you Mexicans and your spicy food.  True, my grandfather would wander about in his legendary garden, among the rows of various peppers, the Fresnos, the Anaheims, the wax, the tams (thus named because they were developed at Texas A&M), and without any sort of dramatic buildup he'd lean down, snap off a ripe pepper and pop it in his mouth.  True, from him my brother and I developed our own scale of What Makes a Good Salsa, which can basically be summed up thusly:  if it makes you sweat, if it makes you feel like the wax in your ears is beginning to melt, if it makes you look like you have a life-threatening condition - that, mis amigos, is a good salsa.  Anything else is just ketchup.   

And then there is my mother:  worst Mexican EVER.  She has no tolerance for spicy food and once complained that her zinfandel was 'too peppery.'  Mustard is out of the question.  So are onions.  Tabasco sauce?  Are you trying to kill her? 

So genetics are out and environment is in, as evidenced by our father, the son of Irish immigrants, native of the Land of Lincoln.  He moves to California to be with my mom and her extended family and voila - the man LOVES the heat.  One time he and I ate an entire bowl of salsa trying to get it just right, heat-wise.  We used that Dave's Insanity Hot Sauce, which is so hot it's stupid, and we'd add a drop to the bowl of too-mild salsa, stir, taste, share our thoughts, and repeat.  Devouring half a bag of chips, we did the entire experiment standing over the counter in the kitchen, while Mom watched All My Children on the Tivo. "What are you two DOING in there?" 

I love my mom but trying to describe to her calibrating a hot sauce to our liking is like describing  celibacy to Tommy Lee.  In theory she may get it; in practice, she thinks you're nuts. 

The Best Part of Waking Up

I guess if someone put Folger's in my cup, I wouldn't be terribly pleased and would likely go back to bed unless I was, por ejemplo, stuck on some fishing boat off the coast of Alaska, it was bitterly cold and my wool knit cap, bought ostensibly for warmth but secretly because I thought I looked awesome in it, was itching the bejeebus out of my scalp, and the first mate, disappointingly not named Gilligan and who, it turns out, does not like being called Gilligan even in jest, arrives before me to say that this is the only coffee on board so it's that or suffer the wrath of the caffeine-withdrawal headache in which case, I would agree that the best part of waking up is indeed Folger's in my cup. 

As it is, I've been making due with coffee that I bought at the Coffee Bean down on Hillhurst.  I say the one on Hillhurst because there are thousands of them here in LA and I want you to get a good sense of this one which is in the Albertson's parking lot and has all the ambience its location would suggest.  It is also a short walk from my new home.  I bought the coffee in a moment of weakness as I've been wary of the Coffee Bean ever since they opened one in my neighborhood in SF, across Sacramento from my beloved Peets and across Fillmore from Voldemort, er, Starbucks.

Opening a coffee franchise at the same intersection where Peets and Starbucks already dominated seemed like a bone-headed move to me.  I assumed they would fail immediately but instead the Coffee Bean is flourishing.  They have a market.  While Starbucks at least pretends to cater to people who say they like coffee but secretly hate it, Coffee Bean embraces the faux-coffee-lovers with both arms.  Coffee Bean is the coffee place for people who don't want any coffee in their coffee drinks. 

You can confirm this by visiting any Coffee Bean, Starbucks and, to a lesser extent, Peets:  customers using more than four adjectives to describe their 'coffee' drink, which then arrives furnished with a straw.  For the record, if you're drinking coffee through a straw, you do not like coffee. 

Listen, I get the whole doctoring-up-your-coffee-until-it-doesn't-taste-like-coffee thing.  I have been there.  I was once like you, my friends.  Let me set the scene for you:  I was four.

A few weeks ago, I went to the Grove to see a movie with a friend and afterwards we got a quick bite.  I was jonesing for some java.  In fact, I may have actually said that: 

"I am jonesing for java."

On second thought, that is something that I just can't hear myself saying but suffice to say that I made my wishes known and discovered something interesting about the Grove.  Everything there is designed to have a singular purpose, as though each merchant had agreed never to compete with any other merchant.  Therefore, there was no getting coffee in the bookstore, no coffee at the ice cream shop (or shoppe, if you must), at the donut stand or at the sushi bar.  If you want X, you must go to the X store.  Which is why we had to stand in a very long, very slow-moving line at the Coffee Bean just so I could get a cup of coffee.

I'm used to Peets with its espresso drink line and its everyone else line, designed so that coffee drinkers wouldn't be slowed down by latte drinkers.  Coffee Bean had one line where people could order mugs, hats, Coffee Bean limited edition Subarus and the like, which meant that people like me who simply wanted that iconic cup of coffee had to wait an eternity.  As it turned out, people like me was just me.

Which is probably why, when I got to the head of the line and asked the dude behind the counter for a plain old cup of coffee, his shoulders collapsed with relief.  He smiled, whispered something about how great it was to meet someone who actually liked coffee and got me my coffee.  For free.

That week I found It's a Grind, which is the coffee favored by Mary-Louise Parker's character on Weeds.  I thought it was fictional until my neighbor in SF told me he was considering opening a franchise.  He told me that the coffee was better than Peets, which I took as being rather harsh and unnecessary, like sticking your finger in someone else's nose, but he said it and I'm just reporting back to you what he told me.  Anyway, I couldn't find a Peets and I was curious about this place so when I passed one on Vermont Avenue, I stopped in.    

It must have been a brand-new franchise, the slighly sour odor of freshly laid carpet mixing with the faint smell of desperation and hope.  The denizens appeared to be the sorts who wouldn't make it in any established coffee shop, which is to say they looked unfriendly, antisocial and not a little paranoid, the sorts who would make Harvey Pekar look positively Ryan Seacrest-esque. 

But the coffee:  it was excellent.  I got a cup of their House Blend which was nice, a little bright but hitting all the right notes.  I decided to get a pound and this was when I began to worry about the survival of this place.  I ordered a pound of the Tanzanian Peaberry ground for a cone drip.  If you buy coffee often enough where they grind it for you, you know that this should be a #4 or 5 grind. Of course, if you work at a coffee shop that sells and then grinds beans, you should probably also know that too.  And this guy didn't.  He then also told me that no one's ever ordered that kind of coffee before and he didn't know what it was like.  When you come back, please tell me what it's like, he said.  Again, I worry for the place. 

The coffee was surprisingly delicious but the experience of getting it was too stressful, and besides, the Coffee Bean is closer to home - and therein lies to path to ruin.

If you buy a pound of coffee from the Coffee Bean, you must not assume that the coffee was roasted anytime in the last month, nor that it will taste anything like the description.  You are after all getting coffee from a place that caters to the non-coffee coffee drink lover, which is as much a red flag as eating at a burrito place (again, me and the burritos) where if you order a carne asada burrito they ask you, "Yeah, but what kinda meat you want?"  (This is a true story which fills me with rage every time I think of it.)  So it can't be a surprise that the coffee was Not Good.  What was a surprise is that with every pound of Not Good Coffee they give you a packet of coffee filters.  Weird.  Like that makes up for it. 

Instead, I am glad to be finally through the pound of the Coffee Bean's crap beans. 

I have learned my lesson and will search for Peets and for my beloved Major Dickason's Blend.  Failing that, there's always Folgers.