The first few months of this year have seen a raft of new cafés open all across town. Like any good citizen consumer, I recently decided to try a few of them. It’s very strange, bouncing from café to café—as dumb as it always sounded in my long-ago stint as a Starbucks employee, the café is truly unlike a bar or restaurant in just how much more comfortable you become there.
Also in these first months of the year, the café near my office, which I’d visited three to six times a week for years, changed hands and switched coffee suppliers from a local roaster to a neighboring-state coffee that will remain nameless.
To be clear, this had been my café not just because it was a two-minute walk from the office, but because it was good: excellent pastries, good enough coffee, art that (usually) didn’t make me hate myself. There are other coffee options nearby—I snobbishly hate them all.
It’s not exactly that I’ve been auditioning new cafés that could become my regular coffee haunt: None of these is actually close enough to my home or workplace to quite fill that hole in my life. (It appears that for now I’ll have to brew my own coffee at work. Condolences may be sent to the Mercury office.)
But it did feel a bit like speed dating. It has to do with how intimately comfortable you can imagine being in a place. People at their cafés will open their laptops and basically broadcast private communications to anyone with a wandering eye. They’ll lounge on old couches, bobbing their heads with headphones on. When you go to a café, the question you’re asking is “Could I one day come to this place in slippers?
