It may suck, but they do have coffee shops there
Well, sorta. It was written a week ago or so that the 29th St Mall is lame. That may be true, but there’s still coffee being served and today this reviewer actually found itself in the mall. So….
1- Pete’s Coffee and Tea has pulled up shop here. Californians know Pete’s well as the Starbuck’s antidote. Not sure why, since Pete’s is every bit as corporate as Starbucks, but maybe the coffee is better. I personally know some coffee nuts that have Pete’s coffee mailed to them back east because when they lived near SF they got addicted. Go figure. Anyway, sorta nice to have a Starbucks alternative here but THEY DON’T HAVE WIRELESS!!! Can you believe it? So go for the coffee and that’s it. That and the only thing the place doesn’t have in common with SB is the name.
2- Starbucks. Yea, there is one here. Turns out it looks exactly the same as the other 9,465 stores in the western U.S. Next….
3- Panera Bread. Ah, now here was a find. It is weird in a very corporate, chintzy, cheesy way, but for the laptop worker it’s actually pretty damn nice. It’s open and spacious with lots of corners and tables both against and away from windows. It’s not really a coffee shop but a pastry/lunch counter (bagels, sandwiches, etc.) with coffee (don’t count on the boy working the auto espresso machine to have any idea how to work it). The chairs are comfortable and at least so far the room is mostly empty. Logging on to their (free) wireless they flash you a message that you have to acknowledge before getting on that asks you to respect their busy time (11a – 2p) and not take up a 6-top with your work project, but I can abide all that. And I can also try to ignore the gimmicky “french toast” flavor bagel I got and the fact that the cream cheese came in a little tin for me to spread myself. (The sacrifices we make for good working conditions….) Panera is nearest Walnut on the 28th St side of the mall.
Where to go when you want….
[ed. note: We realized (in a flash of utter brilliance) that a real Boulder coffee guide would actually list all of the shops we've mentioned in one post. So here's another permapost, to be updated continuously as new info and opinion trickles in. Comments will of course be considered in editing this post.]
Where to go when you want….
The best in coffee
The Cup (Pearl between 15th/16th) Sidney’s (Walnut between 13th/14th)Inconsistent coffee
almost every shop….espresso quality can be very barista-dependent Saxy’s Folsom St. Organica (let’s just say: bad drinks all around)A really busy work scene
Saxy’s Folsom St Vic’s @ Ideal (don’t go before 11am: no wireless)
Cafe M goes buh-bye
Tomorrow Aug 30 is Cafe M’s last day. It’s going to reopen in a few weeks as a pastry shop.
WTF? You find a good, quiet shop and it goes under. Big loss.
worst customer service ever
The Cup has delicious coffee. But here’s what happened: I get a latte with spoiled rotten milk. nasty. I take it back up to the owner who was working the counter.
me “this latte is bad”
him: “ok, we will make you a new one”
me: “no, I mean your milk is spoiled”
him: “i SAID we will make you a new one”
wow, I believe if you have that bad of an attitude you should not open a coffee shop. I also saw him send a customer back to his table to scrounge for an additional $.04 instead of comping him the difference. very awkward and horrible customer service. im boycotting them, plus their decor and layout is very ill-advised
They drink coffee out east? (an Ozo review)
Well, I finally made it east of 30th Street. Waiting for some car service, I could either head back into town or stay out in 55th-land, so I stayed (Ozo is on Arapahoe @ Conestoga in an unanchored strip mall that also has a Snarfs). A previous commenter had gently asked us why we had never heard of Ozo, and being a good coffee shop blogger I thought I oughta oblige the question. So here I am.
First, let’s get this off the table: Ozo serves Allegro coffee. You regular readers will know how multiple authors on this blog feel about Allegro. As in, we don’t. But being a dedicated coffee shop reviewer, I decided to give Allegro another try, knowing as we all know that, ultimately, the pour is probably more important than the roast. As some of us know, there are only a few drink styles worthy of assessing coffee quality: the Americano and the Macchiato. Both styles allow the full flavor of the espresso to be assessed. Straight espresso is too shocking to the cheeks and tongue to be assessed well by any but the most senses-hardened, so most of us need the moderating influence of a little water (the Americano) or a little milk (the Macchiato) to temper the excruciating acidity of straight espresso. Thus I ordered an Americano. It was surprisingly even, and while bitter at first, mellowed after a few sips. Not knock-your-socks-off delicious (it tasted like decent drip coffee, which I think is a failing for an Americano), but much better than any Allegro pour I have had that hasn’t been adulterated with copious chocolate and milk.
As for the non-coffee aspects of Ozo, I was happy as soon as I walked in the door. The layout works well at first sight, with the patron line constrained and isolated from the seating area with a moderate 4-foot wall that doesn’t feel imposing but does impose order lacking in many other shops (i.e., The Goat and Trident, two popular shops we still haven’t written about). The entire shop is open with unconstrained sightlines. Window banks fill the entire east side but only half of the north side and are absent on the west and south, which means half of the seating is in a slightly dark, windowless environment while the other half is against large, open windows. This does present something of a problem, as the seating is more disjointed and uncomfortable on the windowed east side, with two small tables (with hellaciously uncomfortable aluminum chairs; I sat in one for all of 12 second before I moved) and a counter-height 6-top table. Because of all this I felt a bit constrained by my seating choices, wanting to stay in the brighter area but fighting the hard, direct sun (the sun will get higher in an hour and then it will be perfect, but at 9:40a it’s not perfect), wanting to sit in the lower tables to have access to an outlet but not being able to tolerate the cheap metal chair, so having to sit at the counter-height table with no outlet and a good amount of sun. I’d move to the northwest corner but it feels claustrophobic over there with no windows. But that’s me. I like big windows in my coffee shop offices so I can look outside while thinking. Eventually I moved to the only table on the north windows (better chairs, out of the reflected sun, available outlet) and was much happier.
You wish you were here
Ok, Boulderites, I’ve found it. The best coffee shop in town, by far. This place is spaciously huge (30 feet wide by at least 200 deep) with 30 or 40 or 50 large tables not even remotely crowded close. The frontage is all glass, the walls rustic brick, the counter down on one wall half way toward the back. The service station is wide and set well away from the serving counter, allaying the concern expressed by another reviewer a few days ago. The food is great, pastries (including whole pies!) are made on the premises. This has to be the best coffee shop to work from that I’ve found yet.
Problem is, it isn’t in Boulder. It’s in Missoula, Montana. It’s called Break Espresso and it is what Boulder wants. What Boulder is crying for. What the Goat would be if it had any soul in its design. What Vic’s downtown could be if they’d take out a loan to buy a clue. What some of the other Boulder shops could be if they could only figure out that they need to get better music and turn it down.
There are some drawbacks. The wireless is modem-speed and the tea selection is paltry. (I haven’t tried the coffee but I’ve already had at least four shots of espresso today so that’s plenty.) The flat wood chairs are on this side of spartan and they’re all the same. But I’ll take those drawbacks for the work environment, which feels much more welcoming than any of the Boulder shops reviewed in these pages.
Staying in town, it should be noted: the work environment here at Break is fabulous but the bigger treat in Missoula is the espresso milkshake at Butterfly Herbs, just one block south on Higgins. Think heavy, think two shots of espresso, some espresso powder thrown in for fun, real whipped cream on top. To die for. But not a great place to work.
Missoulians have a little brother-big brother thing about Boulder (sort of like Portland and Seattle), pish-poshing Boulder as the former Missoula that sold out or got too big for its britches. But fear not, Boulderites. You’re like Dodgers fans to Giants fans … it’s a one-way rivalry and while the other hates you, you don’t even know they exist. So get out a map, find Missoula in western Montana and road trip on up here. Bring your laptop and sit down at Break Espresso, have a shake at Butterfly, get a fish burrito at Taco del Sol (think the best of Illegal Pete’s and Wahoo’s, but twice as good as both), go float down the Clark Fork. You won’t be disappointed.
Not afraid to agree: 29th St sucks!
A rouge letter writer named Doug Richards says it all today in the Colorado Daily:
What the Colorado Daily, Boulder City Council, 29th St. developers and their tenants like Laudisio failed to anticipate, is that for thousands of Boulder county citizens, shopping centers are dinosaurs, and with little exception, those citizens avoid them like the proverbial plague. Twenty Ninth St., or whatever it’s called, is no different, except that it is perhaps one of the poorest designed and ugliest complexes to ever disgrace the city of Boulder.
Looking north from Arapahoe Ave, one is assaulted by the sight of the monstrously ugly Home Depot, a huge wall of brick (rather than south facing glass to collect the daily delivery of free solar energy) behind which the new Wild Oats store stands empty, and a corridor called 29th St. that leads one to an unwelcoming, utterly soul-less vista of the usual corporate crap, before redeeming itself with a handy escape route out to Canyon Boulevard.
Please excuse this letter writer’s vehemence, but good lord, what part of innovation and imagination do the people responsible for that thing not understand?
I must have missed an article that precipitated this letter, but I think I can easily guess that it went something like, “Sales at the new 29th St Mall are far lower than expected….” As Richards point out, no shit! Despite the fawning and glowing by the city council, the papers and other corners of the city establishment, there is absolutely nothing remotely compelling about that project. More shopping? Yipeee!!
Let’s not forget about convenience
Today NYTimes columnist Stanley Fish decries the diminished convenience of the modern coffeeshop. Primarily, waiting in lines for neophytes making complicated orders and dancing around the drink prep station with other patrons. Read it here.
Fish addresses issues that were confronted and accepted by nearly every coffee-goer on the planet five years ago, and in general discloses an alarming mediocrity on the NYTimes columnist bench (”Maureen Dowd and Thomas L. Friedman are off today”).
However, I must applaud Fish for making a valid critique leveled primarily at Starbuck’s (”wood or concrete floors, lots of earth tones, soft, high-style lighting, open barrels of coffee beans, folk-rock and indie music, photographs of urban landscapes” where else could this be?), but also applies to many of the local shops we frequently praise in these pages.
In one of my favorite shops I recently waited five minutes for half-and-half while a fellow patron searched for his favorite section in the newspaper bin, conveniently located under the drink prep counter. Poor user design is really the only culprit and we can do better.
We should not allow this sudden hipness and ambience to obscure a basic decline in convenience. Good design must work well, as well as please the senses. A few suggestions:
> Multiple drink prep “stations” so that 2-3 folks can doctor their drinks without dancing around each other
> Create well placed stand-and-wait areas for people waiting for drinks that allow them to stay out of everyone else’s way and provide a spot for taking a bite from a pastry and, for extra credit, quick entertainment like newspapers, games, video/web news, etc.
Fish presents the old time diner-style coffee shop as the pinnacle in convenience. The population of this style of shop has been in permanent decline since about 1985, a fact that shows Fish is a decade or three behind the times. Also, it reveals too narrow an appraisal, surely we can all appreciate the elevation in standards for most important metrics: e.g., coffee quality, ambience, workability, healthy food choices, musical diversity, fair-trade/sustainable products, architecture.
Lastly, Mr. Fish, if you really do pine for a diner coffee shop, complete with vinyl stools and raspy-voiced wait-staff, you should start one. We’ll even commend you if you include some modern conveniences like espresso and free wireless.
Iz Joe’s expanding?
Let’s put it this way: either Joe’s is about to triple their space into the unit immediately south or else they are about to get a competitor. Of course I could just ask but isn’t speculation more fun?
Evidence: looking into the windows of the space to the south affords a view of an almost-finished space that looks suspiciously like a coffee shop. Ok, it really could be anything but the big espresso machine with three huge pull handles is kind of a giveaway. Then again, there is also a kitchen grill area with big fume hood. So maybe Joe’s is thinking of doing food + coffee, or perhaps a new counter-order restaurant is going in that is also going to serve espresso. Or, thirdly, scuff marks on the floor and a “This Space Available” sign in the window might indicate that it already was a restaurant that has gone under. If that’s true it came and went before I even started coming to this ‘hood. Time (or a Joe’s employee?) will tell.
Oh, and drinking at Joe’s today I finally realized something about Allegro coffee. It is passable if you mix it with a lot of chocolate and heavy milk. I remember thinking this at Vic’s, too. It’s just not good coffee otherwise. Here’s hoping Joe realizes that, too, and soon. If you think I’m the only one harping on this, see this comment.
(And, again, we don’t mean to steamroll anybody on this blog. If you’re an Allegro lover you’re welcome to post here. If you love Vic’s people probably want to hear from you. Email kevin if you want to be an Allegro or Vic’s defender.)
customer service again
The tip jar is full, the joint is packed and people keep streaming in, so what’s with the bad attitude. Are you on a caffeine downswing? Is it that big of a deal to fill up the water pitcher? Okay, you don’t have to smile, but be gracious and acknowledge that I’m trying to help you out by bringing back my dishes and saving you the trip for the water refill.
Look at Saxy’s. The place is packed not only because it’s the “new cool thing”, but because the staff is great and EVERY time I go in there I get a smile and a warm hello (even as a newbie).
What are non-people-persons doing working at a coffee shop? There are many more aspects of being a barista than pulling an espresso shot. Look at Amante, the staff is outgoing, generous, upbeat and super competent with all aspects of coffee preparation. And while I’m not a huge fan of the occasional euro-scene, I really like the environment.
Yeah, I know, the barista isn’t actually flirting with me, but shoot, developing some sort of rapport does wonders for my work attitude – not to mention their tips. Enjoy what you do, and even if you don’t, do your best to fake it.
