| rev:text
| - If you want a really good Americano, you go to Giuseppes' or Murcato even Kawa.
Beano on the other hand is passé to the extreme. What used to be a place where one could sit and listen to the Mount Royal College a capella singers warm up in the morning, classical music and Bernard Callibeaut in your scones, a place where artists could actually discuss art because you could hear yourself over the loudspeakers, has become since the loss of its wonderful owner and manager, Rhonda (and now it's a conglomeration of investors running the operation), this echoing cave of poorly supervised dilettantes who stand around chatting making mediocre drinks with mediocre products, while the line up grows and grows, and is roundly ignored.
But what has happened to Beanos is the same that happened to the Roasterie and Planet coffee shops. It has been taken over by intrusive smokers on the outside seats and intrusive music on the inside. Regulars living on AISH with no place to go during the day, have encamped with their anxious and hostile disease symptoms, lashing out at the slightest provocation or assertion. Eastern Europeans of no obvious source of income have taken over the outside all day and evening yelling at each other in some home dialect and smoke in huge volumes. Sometimes a fight breaks out. What used to be a liberal place friendly to the arts has become this conservative money machine where even the bathrooms have keys. Conservatives love to control things in their anxiety, especially, who does their defecating and where.... So basically you go through this cordon of intrusive street people smokers, to stand in a line up where you are ignored by the staff, to be served a mediocre bitter Americano, prepared laboriously one at a time while 3 staff chat and watch one person work on a machine that can do 4 at once....to try to find a seat where someone is likely to join you to scream over the music to his friends at the next table because he has a divine right as a regular to sit at your table and be intrusive, because he needed your table in his sociopathic manner and surely you won't mind.
That's most of the day. In the morning it is quieter, when the uber-yuppi ultra-conservatives from Mount Royal come down the hill for their coffee and crossword, to one up each other about their retirement and investment plans, which seem to mostly consist of unimaginatively (no surprise there) of sitting in a coffee shop and doing a crossword wondering what they did with their lives.
There are some holdovers from the former management, like a great meat loaf sandwich, and the occasional 500 or so calorie muffin that isn't raw in the middle, but the warmth and friendliness is gone, literally. The place is freezing in the winter time like an adult child of an alcoholics home, lending a sense of the familiar I suppose to the rampant cigarette addicts, who you know, like to breathe on you and cuddle up real close, and listen in on your private conversation while you drink your mediocre coffee that you waited a very long time for while the staff cranks the tunes, in an apparently self defeating effort to force people to leave to free up some seats, as a solution to the line up and cash flow problems. One could only guess. More likely, the staff just wants to listen to loud music and not work very hard and get tipped for the abuse they heap upon the public, a strategy that passes for service in a place over run by greaser hippies using the premises as a halfway house for the mentally ill.
Enjoy your coffee. (it's not that good).
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)