Starbucks ≠ Neighborhood Coffee Shop

Over at Blue Collar Workman, TB rounded up another blue-collar dude as a guest contributor, who tells a funny story. Along the way he describes searching for a coffee shop and ending up having to settle for a Starbucks, a place where both the coffee and the clientele were jarringly overpriced. Ron’s mention of this episode came literally just a few hours after some friends of mine, true old-Phoenix folks, invited me to breakfast at a favorite hangout of theirs, a real honest-to-God neighborhood coffee shop.

When they asked me to meet them in darkest Sunnyslope, one of those lock-your-car-doors parts of town, I was given pause. However, we’d have a man along (albeit an 80-something man…wonder if he packs heat?). So, bright and early it was off to breakfast at the Eye Opener Café.

Talk about your blast from the past! It’s a real, genuine roadside coffeeshop, the sort of place every small town and wide spot in the road used to have, and that, in bigger cities, used to grace every neighborhood. The wall-sized (incredibly high-E) windows gazing out onto the passing traffic, the Naughyde-upholstered booths with the Formica tabletops, the 1970s green Formica cabinet in behind the cash register, the amiably blowzy blue-jean-clad waitress, and best of all, the locals!

It used to be you’d go to one of these places around breakfast-time and find it full of guys in khakis or jeans and workshirts, all of them chewing more metaphorical fat than bacon: solving the problems of the world (and along the way sharing a fair amount of town gossip) before heading out to the jobsite. The Eye Opener had a bunch, most of them gray of hair and beard.

Reminded me of a place I used to visit, oh…40, 45 years ago, also in Sunnyslope. It was an old Dunkin Donuts.

We owned a ranch outside of Yarnell, up above the Rim. Two or three times a week, I’d drive up there, usually to meet a friend there, grab a horse and just be gone all day long. It was only about a 90-minute trip, once you got beyond the Phoenix traffic. In those days—and still, I’m told—Dunkin’ had the best coffee of any fast-food joint. So as I headed out, I’d stop at the Dunkin’ in Sunnyslope to grab a cup of coffee and a doughnut to sustain life during the drive.

The place was always full of old-timers and working men, and every time you’d go in there, you’d overhear some entertaining snippet of local news. It was great.

Probably they were there because by that time Sunnyslope was getting a shade blighted and any coffee shops that might have existed there were long gone. So they were forced to have recourse to a chain.

In due time, the Dunkin’ closed, too, presumably done in by Cinnabons and those icky Krispy Kreme things. Bad taste drives out good, so they say. 😉 It was replaced by a shop from some other chain, whose owners did not understand the concept of “coffee.”

My mother and I used to frequent a coffee shop in San Francisco, not far from my junior high school. San Francisco being what it is, the food was pretty good: a hamburger had real meat in it: ground round in hand-formed patties, and you could get it cooked to order. “Rare” meant deep pink, verging on red. Order “very rare” and you were apt to get something like beef tartare. The bread was thick slices of real sourdough, toasted to perfection on a greasy grill, and the French fries were actual potatoes cut up in the restaurant and cooked to order. Delicious!

But that was the exception. We dined our way from coffee shop to coffee shop across the country on the several times we traversed America, from New York to Dallas to San Francisco and back. Typically the food was much like what you’d find in a Denny’s today: ranging from pretty bad to just OK. Your best bet was to buy things that were hard to ruin: ham and scrambled eggs for breakfast, a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, meat loaf for dinner.

That was about the story for our Sunnyslope discovery. It’s hard to ruin a pancake made from a packaged mix, for example (it can be done, but the short-order cook has to work at it), so that’s what I asked for. The blueberry pancake that came out was a little soggy, probably because the berries hadn’t been mixed into the batter but tossed on the grill and then the stock pancake batter poured over them. The bacon was very good: crisp but not burnt. The coffee was passable, a cut above Circle K’s.

Maybe the quality of the food explains the swift extinction of the ubiquitous greasy spoon when the horrid McDonald’s and its ilk came on the scene. If you’re going to eat mediocre food, why wait for it when you can drive past a window and pick it up without ever getting out of your car?

Too bad. We lost a crucial piece of Americana when we abandoned the local coffee shop. As Ron, the guest author at Blue Collar Workman, points out, a Starbucks ain’t no coffee shop. The atmosphere is unwelcoming—in fact, all that echoing hard-edged plastic decor was specifically designed to discourage people from sitting around and talking at length—the food is ridiculous, and the coffee that underlies the sticky confections they sell as drinks is akin to battery acid. Why anyone would want to go there beats me.

When Edward Hopper painted Nighthawks, he spoke to an American vernacular experience that anyone who grew up in this country during the mid-twentieth century would instantly know. The sights, sounds, smells, and flavors of such a place were part of our culture. Probably the greatest value of such places was that they gave us a place to hang out, shoot the breeze, and get to know each other.

Where do you hang out today? Can you hear each other talk there?

Images:

Nighthawks. Edward Hopper. Link to Wikipedia file.
Dunkin’ Donuts shop in Geneva, New York. N-Lange.de. GNU Free Documentation License.