Caffetto Café

Weather: 30°, Snowstorm.
Coffee Shop: Caffetto Café • 708 W 22nd St • Mpls • First Time
Drink: Americano ($2.60 Dbl)
Book: The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear edited by Paul Rogat Loeb


Coffee
Some of the coffee shops closest to me I've been leaving for days like today: snowstorms which I have absolutely no desire to try and drive in. Because what can be better in a snowstorm than putting on your boots and trudging in 7" of snow to the nearest coffee shop? So today I finally went to the coffee shop that might possibly be closest to me. Why I've never gone until now is a bit of a mystery. I guess, in a way, I was as intimidated by Caffetto as I was by Bob's Java Hut. However, after my experience today, I kind of want to scrap the rest of my list and spend every Sunday here.

First of all, if I had the power I would rename Caffetto Cafe to Ephemera Cafe, because that is the first word that came into my head when I sat down here. The place is filled with so many random things everywhere (particularly on the walls). It's what I imagine you'd get if Hard Times Cafe (Minneapolis) and The Anchor Bar (Superior, WI) had a love child coffee shop with friendly service. I was so visually (and caffienatedly) stimulated that I could hardly concentrate on my book or knitting. The paintings on the walls are beautiful, and there is a bunch of random sailboat art above the spacious counter area. Even the tables are covered in a melange of ephemera from photos to lace to dried flowers and magazine cutouts. In the end this all added up to an overall feeling of comfort.

Despite wanting to try the mysterious "Flaming Mocha" (which Google has since revealed as a mocha with cayenne pepper), I decided on my classic Americano. The drink at first was mildly disappointing, a little burnt tasting. But after I let it cool down to a little over room temperature, I found it to be pretty satisfying. It's not great coffee, but it's also not bad coffee. I also enjoyed a brownie cookie (which was $2 but quite large and delicious). The options here are unending: sandwiches from Modern Times, a plethora of gourmet sodas, soup, pumpkin pie, cake, scones, danishes, and most importantly, donuts from The Donut Cooperative! Now that I know I can get locally-made donuts without having to travel over to Seward I am overjoyed. But hopefully, for my waistline's sake, I forget that this option exists.

The space, beyond the decor that I already mentioned, is super cozy. There is the requisite coffee bar, and in the adjoining room there is a whole lot of old diner booths, including some big corner ones for 4+ people. There is nothing better than a coffee shop with comfy seating. The music while I was there was good, so I didn't mind that it was a little louder than I usually like. It started with some awesome folk bluegrass, but then changed to some nice modern instrumental music that I was able to drown out. There are shelves full of board games that make me want to go back with some friends for a game; there was a couple playing chess longer than the two hours that I stayed. I also heard the constant sounds of ping pong coming from the basement, which I didn't have the courage to explore.

So, despite this not being the best cup of coffee around, it's by far been the best atmosphere. And being less than a 10 minute walk from my front door, I can see myself going here a lot more both to work and hang out with friends (and eat donuts).

Book
I'm still reading the last two books that I wrote about, so today I brought along a book of short essays that I own titled The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear. I read half of it on a trip last year, and haven't finished the rest yet. This is a book that everyone should own and read again and again.

Edited by Paul Loeb, an American social and political activist, this book is filled with short stories and essays by people such as Bill McKibben, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and Vaclav Havel. Each of the nine sections has a different theme ranging from grace and dreams to courage and justice. The editor describes the anthology as, "pieces that explore the historical, political, ecological, and spiritual frameworks that help us to persist—with concrete examples of how people have faced despair and overcome it. Some directly address our current time. Others examine what it was like to confront South African apartheid, the Eastern European dictatorships, or Mississippi's entrenched segregation. Still others look at what keeps us going day after day. I believe this book will help us, in the words of Sojourners founder Jim Wallis, to learn how to believe in spite of the evidence, then watch the evidence change."

One of the things I distinctly remember being amazed by while reading the first half of the book last year was the applicability of issues in history to issues we are facing today with religious intolerance, war, climate change, etc. Today I read an intro essay by Loeb about the courage to stand up. He got a little partisan while discussing politics, but he ended by admitting that both major US parties are at fault. He talked a lot about the need in a democracy for the people to be active, which these days I see a lot of people don't put enough effort toward (even myself, although I've been trying to do better). Due to my growing interest in "community" I'm excited to read the piece by Jim Wallis, Faith Works, which Loeb quoted saying, "He calls for a new movement that would link people's 'desire to change their lives with a commitment to change their communities.'" I think I will reread the first half after I finish the second half, but of course this is a book that you can reread again and again (and not necessarily from front to back). Life-changing? Maybe not. Thought-altering? Most definitely.

People Watching
The crowd (and it certainly did become a crowd) at Caffetto was great and extremely diverse. I didn't really catch any conversations, but I had a great time observing people. Two were playing chess, many were working alone on their laptops. A friend of the barista was chatting with him at the bar. People came and went frequently. The silly girl in me wants to mention how many attractive men there were (sorry!). And in the end, I ended up relinquishing my table to one of them, as there were no tables left. I could imagine some serendipitous table-sharing happening here at really busy times; it definitely seemed like the kind of crowd that would be all over serendipitous sharing.

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