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| - Usually I don't just avoid "gluten-free-vegan-friendly" joints, I run from them, but it was cold and slippery and we needed a place to get some work done without eating so we wouldn't ruin our appetites for Sri Lankan lunch at KJs Curry Bowl. We also wanted to be downtown, and this cafe was closest to the legal parking spot we miraculously stumbled across on a near zero degree January Madison morning. Serendipity is always good. As expected, the baked goods were not tempting, but my cappuccino was properly prepared and the tea bag tea the Chief of Staff ordered was adequate.
We prefer tea served properly boiling hot over loose leaves in a tea pot with a normal sized tea cup and saucer, since we were in an American coffee shop I knew to order coffee. Like a lot of coffee shops, they serve tea in an oversized coffee mug and saucer which actually makes it a bit of a challenge to drink while you are concentrating on reading. The cappuccino comes in a cappuccino came in a cappuccino cup. American coffee shop owners must love Italians but hate the British. Hmm, maybe that's fair.
It's a sunny wide open room, with a smaller warmer room in the back (with a fireplace!), the State Street facing window gives the place a warm feeling even on a frigid day. Most of the tables are set up for sitting straight and getting some work done, but there's a round low table with an assortment of more comfy chairs, these chairs called my name. Once in reading position, only then did I consult YELP and was pleased to find that from my comfy chair I was looking out the window right up at the apartment the famous Sarah P. lived in during her undergraduate days (above the Jamba Juice) and I do like historic places.
Scrolling through the YELP reviews, I wondered about the handful of negative reviews, complaining about the service and the sandwich prices. I'm not sure that the prices complaint is still valid (the worst reviews seem older) as costs here for the food and beverages are completely in line with the location. I'm an academic, I've had coffee and preposterous conversations all over this town. I think that your opinion of the service might depend on personal taste. Me, I don't like the fake saccharine insincere friendliness of many corporate chain coffee shops. I've got a pathetic recently divorced middle-aged overweight heterosexual male friend, an academic who still wears his thinning graying hair long in a sad ponytail to give you a mental picture, he loves Starbucks mainly because some attractive young goth thing will smile at him and act like she's glad to see him. That sentence was so long that I'm not sure I worked in the key adjective, pathetic. What I prefer about the service here is that the baristas are polite, efficacious and efficient without any ersatz exaggerated friendliness. That doesn't mean they're rude, one of them pretended to listen to the peculiar rambling of some local crazy man (could be a tenured English lit professor) but there was some sort of unspoken but clearly practiced teamwork strategy so entertaining this colorful fellow didn't slow up counter service. I wonder if he was both crazy and an English professor, I mean how could anyone tell?
Although I'm not a fan of the gluten-free fad, and I find vegan to be distasteful and ethnocentric, I do like the social justice of fair-trade. The thing is, I'm not sure that in all of the Madison area that there is a coffee shop that doesn't claim to be fair trade. It is, however, in the name of this place.
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