[Note: This entry was supposed to be published in the nascent coffee publication Longberry, as a sort of long-form polemic on the way cafes are built out and the issue of how culture effects them. You'll note that its slightly less footnoted than my usual stuff -- as polemic, I was given license to be a little more flippant, but I'd like to think the points still stands. A post coming next week will tweak some of the ideas and answer some more specific examples. Till then, enjoy!]
In 2009, 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea opened its doors in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, kiddy-corner from the original location of the city’s forward-thinking coffee roaster, Victrola. When entering, one was greeted by reclaimed hardwood tables, wrought-iron stools, and Edison-bulbs strewn from knotted-wood and rope lamps. Menus written in chalk indicated daily selections of coffee to be prepared lovingly in single cup brewers. It was a taxidermied deer head away from being remarkably twee, were it not for three little words inscribed under nearly everything in the shop.
“Inspired by Starbucks”.
For those not familiar, 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea, as well as its sister café, Roy St. Coffee & Tea, were opened in Seattle by Starbucks. According to Howard Schultz, founder and then newly-reappointed CEO of the company, the idea was twofold, to reflect a less commodified version of the spaces that Starbucks had come to be regarded for, as well as generating a potentially new model for the chain, a way to collapse geographically adjacent stores into a single, more profitable one. The issue of spacial commodification is not a new one – chain restaurants and cafes have, over the last decade, attempted to modify their shops and develop new and interesting ways to appear more individualized, less chain-y – but it does speak to an issue in café layout and physical development, namely, the flavor of place.
We often look to terroir – the French notion of the “taste of place” – as something to be understood at origin, something only the bean, the barista, and the ACF glasses can impart to the consumer. And this is true. However, we also have to remember that the “third space” (that term many café owners abhor and yet need to confront as being a reality of their business) that cafes, coffee shops and roasteries encompass are, at their core, also modes of terroir, each shop imparting its own flavor, building a community around its products and within its physical space. It is a commitment many shops have abandonded in recent years, with a focus on either strict numbers games or design elements that are either uninspired or stylized in ways both abstract and cumbersome to the social role they play. And in a world of increasing coffee prices, more expensive startup and operating costs, as well as increased consumer savvy and awareness, it is particularly sensitive for shop owners and operators to wake up and smell the coffee – proverbially, of course – and begin to consider the place of personality in their shop identity.
This cuts to the core of the issue surrounding the definition of terroir -- a concept often misunderstood, misrepresnted, or largely ignored. Terroir is, largely, a recent term -- while the first sensations of the term begin as far back as Apicious and various Classical & Renaissance scholars and epicures, the word itself does not arrive until the late 1800's by the work of geographer Maurice Edmond Sailland, nee Curonsky, who utilized the notion of various regionalized culinary traditions in his magnum opus Le tresor gastronomique du France. In the book, Curonsky lionizes the various foodways of Frances regions, and in conjunction with the nascent French auto industry (for its Bibendum publication, precursor to the Michelin guides) of its time, began to develop and promote day trips for Parisian and other urban middle classes to explore the culinary diversity of France, digging into the nostalgia of places from which those middle classes may have originated. Over time, this concept evolved as an economic development tool, leading to the creation of the Institute National des Appelations d'Origine in 1905, the organization that even today manages the regulation of the AOC system in France.
From this place, we get the start of what defined official designations of terroir; soil, ecology, environment, and process. By wine standards, and even as far as food from the regions, the Appelation system concerns itself largely from the environmental & biological, looking at longstanding traditions (do communities have a history of making this wine or cheese), generally widespread utility of crop or foodstuff (is it grown widely or consumed widely by the community), shared process (are wines or cheeses made the same way using the same name). The matrix is quite simple: the minerals and content of the soil, going back millenia, interact with the rootstock of particular varieties of wine grapes, or grow the grass that become the fodder for cattle. The weather of a specific year the general ecology of these places interplay, and the handling of the products in processing, along with those two variables, produce the vintage. This collection -- soil, plant varietal, weather, ecology, and processing -- forms the basis of what the INAO would call "terroir".
In some regions, communities will oftentimes define terroir by an additional aspect, the social character of the geography. This has been best characterized by l'affair Mondavi, where the California winemaker Robert Mondavi was prevented from setting up a winery in Southern France, mostly on the contention by the local community that the property he was seeking to develop was essential to the "terroir" of the village itself. The property Mondavi was seeking to purchase was used as hiking, hunting, and foraging preserve as well as a waterway & a windbreak for the village for many generations, and was held in trust by the city. Many in the village made the case that development of the land would remove an essential character of the region, its people, and indeed its ecology & environment – and therefore, its terroir.
While not commonly held, this last note of the social nature of terroir perhaps best captures what many organizations determine as "the taste of place". Outside of the wine world, especially where groups like Tierra Madre or The Ark of Taste are concerned, "cultural appropriateness" plays a part in what constitutes the terroir of a product. Simply because McDonald's has become traditional in certain environments does not make it part of what is culturally, ecologically, or otherwise attuned to a space; there's a context to be considered. To groups like this, which also have a strong connectivity to locavores, bioregionalists, and foodshed developers, talk about the ecological knowledge, the know-how to grow, prepare, and execute certain dishes, and styles of eating. These types of assessments of terroir come from the same people who'll tell you why you can't find Pekin-style duck in Sichuan, or why most Scandiavian breads are ryes instead of white flour (or perhaps, why it's inappropriate to think of making Italian-style loaves in Scandinavia).
This brings us back to the issue of shop personality, or precisely what has become the lack thereof in many coffee houses in what we can generously call “the third wave”. I say lack because, in the decade or so I have frequented or been involved with the coffee industry, there has been a move away from the assertion of personality in café environments; instead of looking at core features, conversations veer primarily and prevalence of retail marketing and branding; guest/customer flow through the café environment, or the near-homicide worthy conversation about how many electrical outlets to provide or eschew, lest the café floor become nothing more than a laptop palace and an electrical bill vampire. All of these are important, but done in ways that ignore some critical distinctions in form and function.
In Viennese coffee houses, for example, much of the seating in set upon the banquettes and walls adjacent to the windows; very few chairs or tables exist in the middle of the floor; if they are, they are usually rounded and given wide berth. Compare with to French cafes of tight square tables, closely drawn peg-legged stools at the zinc bar. Both reflect specific ideas of what the café is – in the Viennese space, a somewhat rarified, aristocratic intellectual space, of quiet corners – a place for people who need company to be alone as Alfred Polgar said. The French spaces had both bourgeoise and proletarian sensibilities about the equality of access to a space, connectivity to the street, an extension of the home brought into the public-private space (and a way of maximizing profit in an allotted space).
These two design considerations speak to notions of what “the café society” can be defined as, another statement inferring a terroirists mindset as it speaks to the social community that forms around café spaces. In the cases above, one could identify a Viennese café and a Parisian one based purely on aesthetic and organizational principles; like the hundreds of hippie groups back in the 1960’s and 1970’s, these environments can be highly distinguishable from one another. Yet ask what distinguishes the “third wave” shop, and all one can really find is conversation about the coffee. The machines. The glasswares. But what social hubs do cafes of the “third wave” tend to have? What social capital do they hold? The answer, I fear, is surprisingly little.
Bygone are the days when cafes reveled in the role of third spaces – a term many seem to associate with grungy couches with sad musicians on Monday night. Occasionally, shops will host cuppings, or nighttime events, and maybe put up art (sometimes awesome, other times irreparably banal). But the thought of community – of a community of people attached to a particular place and time – is noticeably absent, replaced somewhat by a notion of “regulars”, or more amusingly, “guests”. (The notion, from Danny Meyer’s “Setting the Table”, is a noble one, using the term guests as a way to signify that you are bringing someone into your home – i.e. your shop – an ontological way of changing the customer relationship through the strength of a term. While many shops and coffee professionals have stepped up the use of the concept, few, if any, are executing it well, or in the way the Union Square Hospitality Group utilizes it.) There is a certain reason for this – it is hard for shops to justify people sitting for hours at a time on drinks with a very minor markup, and turnover in seating is but one consideration for shop owners (and one of the privileges that some customers believe an inalienable right of their purchase(s)). This in turn, however, is but one of many considerations of what makes the community of people that make a shop, and in turn contribute to its overall social values.
This focus on customer numbers is paired with another consideration: cafes are concerned about their identity insofar as the consideration of brand goes – the types of values and things people associate with them and their product. This has led to shops that are both overdesigned and thoughtful, as well as being underdesigned in the way of turning a shop into a modified Skinner box, where the owners “know” exactly how guests will interact with the space and flow through the café space. We see this all the time: cafes with “stations” providing “individualized attention” but still have you sit in endless lines; “bar service” coffee bars that have you start with the barista at a machine, even if there is no legibility of sign or spatial layout that declares it so, leading to guests wandering in a daze like free radicals on the floor; bars with high stools and tables with no consideration either to the physically handicapped nor those with a desire to linger. The spaces and layout are overwrought, oftentimes presuming much of “guests” and their knowledge of how to operate, and more often than not, detrimental to things like retail sales or efficiency (to get back in line to grab a bag of coffee I could only see available after I paid for and ordered coffee? Noch besser).
Aesthetically, shops will alter in one of two ways – the hypermodern sleek, clean Scandinavian and Dutch Modern lines of steel & glass, or the modern cabin of wood, poured concrete, and taxidermy. (Do I exaggerate? Only slightly. Such is the beauty of polemic.) Both have their issues, as slavish adherence to design without foundations in a cultural legacy are a black hole (thank you, Maholy-Nagy). Filling walls with bric-a-brac found at estate sales in Pennsylvania sends no more message than an episode of Hoarders; the stark white walls and couches set to angles as to place you seated at 45 degrees is to feel at a therapists office. Shops that adhere to either without some sort of connectivity represent the design equivalent of a white person wearing kente-cloth to declare their African-ness; it is merely posturing. And posturing does not make a place pleasant, or tell you much about it, other than its pretentions.
On the notion of space, this too is a consideration for appropriateness; size matters insofar as how it fits in with a given neighborhood, a community, its purpose. Placing a large, warehouse-sized shop adjacent a community of small shops is not only callous, but is largely indicative of shops not truly independent or built from within the community (nor, no matter how you define your aesthetic as being that of a living room, does anyone have a 30ft ceiling filled to the gills with estate sale finds in their living room). Fitting shops into seemingly inappropriate or strange places – like strip malls in suburban spaces – tends to lend itself more to the creation of character because what is inside must stand out in order to be differentiated from the sameness of all the other things it is situated around. The spatial and geographic considerations of a shop inform its identity, its clientele, and parts of its form and function.
Which leads to the question we began with: just what defines the social function, the drink-nature, the taste of place of a coffee house, coffee shop, café? This goes far beyond the question of what a café is – it is a business, a place to obtain coffee, perhaps a pastry, and a catch-up. But this is a lowest-common denominator definition of the thing; it tells us nothing about what function it performs or what it represents. In Mandarin foodways, there is the notion that what defines being Mandarin (as compared to Cantonese or other “foreign” peoples) is to be a “rice eater” or “person made of rice”. The concept exists elsewhere in Asia, but it informs thusly: one feels incomplete if a meal does not feature rice. It is this sort of “completeness” that should define a shop, not necessarily if it has the latest equipment or mustachioed baristas.
So what are some of these considerations?
Firstly, the spatial “legibility” of the space – can you “read” the layout of a shop? Understand its rules and systems? And is it done intuitively, not requiring laborious and often condescending treatment by staffers?
Secondly, does the space make a coherent statement of character? Do the furniture, aesthetic choices for décor and other treatments match up, and not in that horribly institutional Restaurant Supply kind of way? Or is it completely unmatched in a wabi-sabi kind of way? How goes it “fit” into the surrounding neighborhood?
Thirdly, the Danish have a concept called hygge, interpreted as “closeness” both physical and emotional. Over time, does one develop a sense of closeness with a shop? And is it reciprocal? (In addition, does the shop team seem to have closeness, in that they stick around and have the time to develop that kind of rapport with both each other and customers?)
Lastly, do all of these things come together in a way that develops an identity in parallel with the services being provided? In the way that the layout of Viennese cafes precipitated a style of table-service still around today, do all the elements combine to a point where this shop, this space, this service are interconnected and one? And does it feel connected to its surrounding geography? It should feel so.
In the development of Roy St. Coffee & Tea and 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea, Schultz had it right; shops require things to stand out, to give a persona, to have a character. It is not enough to simply be about the coffee and forgo the elements that draw people in besides the coffee; brand is a poor stand in for personality. As specialty grade coffee prepares to break beyond the 8% of the coffee drinking market that has been its threshold for nearly a decade, it is imperative that the people who sell it look beyond the terroir of the coffees they promote but the terroir of the places they live and the people they are. And customers should seek those spaces that do present a coherent statement of self, not out of principle, but because the affinities those spaces represent are the best kind of hospitality one can ask for.