When asked if I have a favorite cafe, I say no.
I am lying.
If you know where to look, you’ll find the fingerprints of a cafe’s forebears on every one you visit. Coffee as a beverage is old but the specialty coffee industry is young. Stand us side-by-side with the more established world of wine and we’re a gangly teenager that’s quickly outgrowing their twin-sized bed.
The first cafe I ever visited—subsequently the first one I worked at—was the size of a shoebox. With fewer than ten seats and a cream and sugar station that required you to climb over your fellow customers, it was always a little too warm and a little too loud. I loved it.
In order to sit at the bar that wrapped around the back of the shop, you would jostle elbows with everyone who was already seated—a warm prelude of hello’s and sorry’s that would melt into the neighborhood hospitality the baristas offered. Your drink was served in a thick diner mug and the counter tile’s grout was permanently coffee-stained (I later spent hours scrubbing it during staff cleaning nights to no avail).
The shop was young, newly opened by a couple that had a fresh passion for specialty coffee pumping through their veins. It was their first cafe and my first time in a cafe. We were all similarly green in that way.
I didn’t find my favorite cafe until years later though. I’d become a barista by then and was finally working behind the bar that’d I’d spent high school sitting on the other side of. It was summer and my best friend and I had made the 1.5 hour drive up to the big city (Portland, Oregon, for anyone curious). We drank espressos and shopped for plants we could neither afford nor keep alive. It was past my typical caffeine curfew when we eventually decided to head home.
But maybe we could have just one more coffee for the road.
A strange feeling pricked the back of my neck as we entered that last coffee shop. It stuck with me as we ordered and found seats, only growing stronger as I stared at the nearby silver espresso machine. It was a Synesso, the same one that I worked on. The way that the baristas moved was familiar as they lined up mugs and pitchers of milk to match each upcoming order. Cup first, then syrup, then designated milk type, and then pitcher.
The collared shirts and aprons. The dual 64oz Fetco carafes and floral wallpaper. Even the slightly too cramped cream and sugar station. The deja vu that would have me believing I’d stumbled into some alternate reality continued to percolate until my coffee was delivered.
This is where they worked, I thought as I sipped from a thick diner mug, this is the cafe that made them want to open up their own.
Much like chefs carry on the techniques and philosophies of their mentors, so it is within coffee. The cafe that we’d stumbled upon was indeed the alma mater of the couple that I worked for, the proverbial god-parent of the shop that had introduced me to coffee. The familiarity wasn’t my imagination, it could be traced.
In painting the picture of these two cafes—separated by ninety miles of the Interstate 5— I don’t want you to think they were copies of one another. They weren’t and aren’t. On the surface, you wouldn’t see anything more than two different shops serving coffee. But as I said, fingerprints.
The cafes that have love poured into them are much more than walls and equipment. There is a rhythm and cadence to the intangible that you’ll begin to feel the longer you linger.
After finishing the mug of coffee at what would later become my favorite cafe, I drove home in contemplation of the space I’d just inhabited. Stumbling upon a shared heartbeat like that was a rare and unusual experience.
Years later, I would leave my first cafe job and move to Portland. I would still travel home to visit the first coffee shop I ever loved but time eventually ran its course. A change in ownership, the strain of the covid pandemic, all of these factors and more would ultimately lead it to take a new shape that was less familiar to me. The diner mugs were changed out, the front windows stripped of the their signature sigil.
I never turned in my shop key when I left that job—a final task lost in the chaos of moving. The tarnished piece of metal is still on my keyring even though I know that the locks have long since been changed. Nostalgia is a bittersweet friend and there are some days where I miss the crowded chaos of sitting at the back bar in my early coffee years. So I do the next best thing.
I visit my favorite coffee shop. The one that inspired those who inspired me. The grandparent to my own coffee journey. It’s older and more worn-in but the baristas move the same way that I was trained to. We’re kindred in that way, unknowingly sharing a tiny piece of coffee history together.
The coffee is roasted a little darker than I like and the door creaks every time it is opened.
“What’s your favorite coffee shop?”
The one that feels like home.
