[Fox News] The return of café culture and the retaliation against coffee squatters

LAMILL Coffee Boutique, Los Angeles. 

This is the original version of a story that ran in Fox News with the much more dramatic headline, "Cafes declare war on Wi-Fi squatters." You can read the published version here. 

In the '90s (remember them? weren't they nice?), it was not uncommon to see hordes of teenagers and college students at your local Friends-style second-wave coffeehouse chain-smoking cigarettes and sucking down $1 cups of coffee. They would spend hours on end doing this, every single day. And they weren't sitting in silence staring mindlessly at their iPhones uploading "selfies" (now in the Oxford Dictionary!) on Instagram. They talked. To each other. As in, engaged in meaningful dialogue with other humans.

But a lot has changed in the last two decades. Now, we're all wired. Endlessly wired. Phillip K. Dick post-apocalyptic-cyberpunk-novel wired. We have our laptops and our smartphones and our iPads and we are on them ALL THE TIME checking Facebook and Twitter and Instagram or on Snapchat or playing Candy Crush. (Some people even do work.) Bars and restaurants are regularly filled with people blatantly ignoring each other, so much so that "phone-stacking" is a thing that now exists.

And cafes, the standard-bearers of quality social interaction amongst strangers and thinkers and activists and eager young adults since 14^th century Turkey, are now full of "coffee squatters" – those who set up shop with their laptops and spend interminable hours gobbling up the café's bandwidth and available seating, making it so that other customers can't find a place to sit and negatively impacting the shop's business, all so they can do important things like update their Facebook status and download new albums from iTunes.

It wasn't always like this. Cafés offering free Wi-Fi did so with the best of intentions, trying to provide their customers with an additional value in the hopes of bringing more business. It started innocently enough – college students researching essays; business people checking emails (bear in mind, smartphones with email access are still a relatively new thing on the timeline of human existence). But the service is now being broadly abused, and café owners are fighting back.

In San Francisco, Luigi Di Ruocco, owner of Coffee Bar, recently made headlines after restricting access to laptop users during peak times and creating "laptop-free" seating so customers simply trying to have lunch will have somewhere to sit. Fellow café owners all over the country have chosen to place time limits on Wi-Fi use, require an access code to the wireless network (available only with purchase), cover their electrical outlets, or eliminate Wi-Fi altogether. Ben Popken of NBC News writes, "While the measures may seem a bit gruff for coffee shops that have long promoted themselves as a friendly and counter-cultural alternative to the mainstream coffee joints, they're an economic necessity. Coffee shops rely on a high volume of low-price items. Stores can't afford to provide temporary real estate to people looking for a remote office for which they only pay $1.85 in daily rent."

Forbes also warns of the financial threat of squatting. "A coffee shop will never make enough money to pay the bills from coffee sales alone," says Peter Baskerville in answer to the question, "What's the secret to a successful coffee shop?" He instructs café owners to worry less about offering things like Wi-Fi and more about increasing turnover and takeaways. "Takeaway customers pay the same price as the sit-down customer, but without any of the occupancy costs, and you will serve ten of them by the time your sit down customer has finished sipping on their first cup of coffee as they enjoy a chat with their friends on Facebook using your free Wi-Fi."

Jane Shihadeh previously owned Shoe's Cup and Cork in Leesburg, Virginia, a café by day and full fine dining restaurant and wine bar by night. "It's difficult to generate profit from coffee sales alone," she says. "Ultimately it's more about your average check in general. You really need people coming in to eat." She wanted to balance the restaurant with a relaxed coffeehouse vibe, and offered free Wi-Fi to encourage that. "What we found was that there were lots of people that would come in – if you were lucky they would maybe order a large coffee but sometimes they would just demand water – and would sit there for hours." She found that these customers were also the most demanding, and some would even use her café to solicit business from her other customers, engaging them in conversation about their web design needs. Eventually she sold the café (it is now operating under new ownership) and opened a much more straightforward Wi-Fi-free sandwich shop, Philly Rabe's.

In the hipsterific Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake, LAMILL Coffee Boutique, referred to by USA Today as "the white-tablecloth restaurant of coffee shops," has a two-hour time limit on their wireless access because, as manager Dave Alfaro states, "It frees up space. We don't want people sitting there all day long while we have people who want to come in, get a coffee and eat their food." The Boutique also serves a thoughtful selection of wine, beer, and sake, as well as a full breakfast, lunch and dinner menu. Coffee squatters aren't just taking up space and bandwidth (Alfaro has noticed many use the café's free Wi-Fi for large file downloads) from other would-be squatters looking to do the same, but are actually turning away other customers who have nowhere to sit. At Abraco in New York, which also serves a selection of house-made small plates and baked goods, it's standing-room-only – ensuring squatting isn't an issue.

Coffee shops that don't serve food or have only a limited menu of pastries available, like Verve in Santa Cruz, seem to fare better than those that are also restaurants. Ashley Epia, shift lead at the 41^st Avenue location, says the Wi-Fi network is password-protected but the password is given out freely and there is no time limit for usage. The café has a small selection of pastries and does not offer table service. She says that "squatting" isn't really a problem and that people cycle out pretty well. But Verve is also a roaster with a strong wholesale business to support its cafés. Additionally, cafés like this that rely almost predominantly on coffee sales tend to be significantly smaller, thus offering significantly less seating – perhaps making the squatter a bit more self-conscious about taking up one of only a handful of seats.

But the hostility towards "squatters" isn't just about people taking up seats – though the lost revenue for businesses that rely on dine-in food sales is definitely a primary concern. For many it's also about the atmosphere they wish to create. New York's Café Grumpy doesn't offer Wi-Fi or allow laptops in four of their five locations. "For us, yes, it's a space issue, but it's also about the atmosphere it creates," says Café Grumpy owner Caroline Bell. Though the cafés only serve their own house-made pastries and don't face the same challenges as full sit-down restaurants, Bell wanted to create an atmosphere that was "more inviting," allowing for actual conversation to occur rather than the pitter-patter of laptop typing being the dominant sound. "It's less about turnover and more about the experience. People appreciate it." 

Walking into a café and seeing table after table of laptop zombies, faces bathed in blue from the glow of their screens, is a much different experience than walking into a café buzzing with excited conversation, whether it be about politics or the latest episode of Breaking Bad. In recent decades coffeehouses have evolved as much as technology. The ubiquity of smartphones has made the original intent of free Wi-Fi (as an additional service for customers to use sparingly as needed) obsolete, and third-wave coffeehouses are increasingly mindful of encouraging a sense of community – that centuries-old café culture in which cafés served as primary community gathering places.

While you could easily make a case that the squatters of decades past – the Beat writers of 1950s San Francisco, the postmodern philosophers of 1960s Paris, the goth and grunge kids of 1990s America – probably weren't producing high ticket averages, they were producing the kind of human interaction missing from the modern laptop mafia (and let's not get started on "co-working," i.e., ignoring each other in groups while taking up multiple seats). In an age of endless connectivity, sometimes people just want to feel connected; the retaliation against coffee squatting is just one manifestation of a growing social movement.

[Model D] Anthology Coffee finds a permanent home at Ponyride

Anthology Coffee's new space (still under construction.)

2011 Hatch Detroit semi-finalist Anthology Coffee is continuing to build its brand and work on a permanent café in Corktown – happy news, as just a couple of months ago it seemed like they were going to cease all operations.

In 2012 Anthology signed a lease at 2051 Rosa Parks (an office building in Corktown). After some initial efforts were made towards build-out, progress stalled for months and Anthology owner Josh Longsdorf made the decision to leave. At the same time, Anthology also fell short on an Indiegogo campaign that was meant to purchase new equipment; Longsdorf had to use that money to pay off coffee contracts he had purchased in anticipation of being fully open at 2051 months early.

Read more.

[EID Preview] Stella Good Coffee and Good Design

All photos from Stella Good Coffee.

It could easily be said that the best-designed public spaces in Detroit right now are the new breed of coffeehouses that keep popping up. From the citrus-soaked modernism of Urban Bean Co. that looks like it could have been plucked straight out of the pages of Dwell (in fact, and this surely is no coincidence, issues of Dwell are displayed on a magazine rack – "displayed" really being the best word to describe it), to the west coast aesthetic of Astro Coffee (which looks like pretty much every uber-trendy coffeehouse in San Francisco, Santa Cruz and L.A. but with a distinctly Detroit flair) and the modern rustic design of Great Lakes Coffee Roasting Co. in Midtown, coffee houses are no longer the shabby chic student flopping grounds of the '90s but the aesthetically-appealing refuge of the design-obsessed MacBook set. As the coffee has gone from thoughtless drip to compulsively mindful pour-over, so too have the spaces been made over. Stella Good Coffee inside the Fisher Building is the latest example.

Stella Good Coffee, previously known as Stella International Café, closed last fall and is reopening today after going through a redesign that could easily qualify for a segment on Extreme Makeover: Coffeehouse Edition. Kevin Borsay and Shawn Santo, founders and owners of Pure Detroit, the Rowland Café, and both Stella Cafés (there is another location inside the Guardian Building), oversaw all of the work themselves, along with James Willer of Reclaim Detroit, which works with a number of local Detroit nonprofits to deconstruct old, abandoned homes and repurpose the materials for new projects – both a sort of philosophical and literal honoring of Detroit's past while looking forward to the future. (Willer also did some work at Great Lakes.)

This café has been open since 2007, at a time when Detroit's coffee scene was a bit … well, sad. ("Underserved" is a nicer way of saying it.) Certainly long before Detroit became the new Seattle. But in the last several years the coffee culture has been ramped up significantly, and to stay in the game, Stella had to step it up. Borsay explains that the old Stella "didn't have the look and feel we wanted," and that a redesign was always part of the plan. Finally, the time was right.

After a complete gut down to the bare walls and floor, the new Stella is about as completely different as it could possibly be while still retaining the same name (and even that is only partial). Gorgeous century-old wood comprises the completely rebuilt counter, tables and ledges. The floor is the original floor from 1928, buried under layers of concrete. "I saw a picture of that historic floor and wondered if it was still under there," says Borsay. He chopped through all the layers on top of it and "sure enough, it was there." Part of the renovation work included grinding down to the original floor and polishing it up, but the manual labor was worth it: "Albert Kahn had a hand in this floor."

Through Reclaim Detroit, Willer helped Borsay and Santo source materials and, since he is also an architect, worked with them on the new design and the construction. "Without him we couldn't have done it." The wood came from 2644 Cadillac Boulevard on Detroit's east side. The house was disassembled brick by brick and, instead of throwing it in a landfill, remilled it and sold it to Stella.

Willer explains that the wood from these historic old Detroit homes came from native Michigan forests. Michigan now only has about 5% of its original native forests left, which is all protected land. The only place you can get this original native lumber is from these old houses. Additionally, at the time these homes were built – the early 1900s – they used mostly old growth timber that was already 50+ years old. So the wood you see inside the new Stella Good Coffee is at least 150 years old. This Douglas fir is a completely different material than what you could buy commercially, almost an exotic species that is available for a relatively low cost locally (through businesses like Reclaim Detroit, who had to establish their own mill and train people to work it because no other mills could work with these old materials).

Borsay says, "This is a good balance of maintaining the look of the building while also bringing a more modern look. This is beyond just an amenity to the building and a place to get coffee, but about a larger mission: creating vibrant, active Place 3 locations in the city." "Place 3" refers to the places where people socialize, with Place 1 being home, Place 2 being work, and Place 3 being everything else. "For us it's these really cool café environments where people meet and socialize. The more you have in the city, the more vibrant it becomes. That's our mission: to create these sorts of environments to make the city more vibrant. Rowland Café was our first foray into that."

The historic wood and floor are complemented by design elements that include custom-fabricated lampshades from Detroit Wallpaper Company featuring designs by local artists that will rotate regularly. "Instead of having art on the walls, we will have this shades done by different local artists." The happy yellow cloud design currently on display was done by local painter and musician Davin Brainard, an artist whose most recognizable work is probably the "Cloud Bridge" overpass in SW Detroit (though you've undoubtedly also seen his concert posters). The neon "Drink Good Coffee" sign on the back tile wall was fabricated by Spectrum Neon Sign Company, a Detroit business that has been around for over 30 years. "We're trying to use as many Detroit companies as we can," Borsay says.

And that includes the items that they'll serve. They'll have a selection of soups from Russell Street Deli, baked good from Avalon Breads and Traffic Jam, plus a selection of high-quality juices and yogurts in the cooler. This year, to celebrate their seventh year, they are introducing a celebratory espresso called Stella Sonic, as well as some new craft micro lot, micro-roasted coffees which will rotate seasonally.

The new space also has more seating inside (with lots of additional seating in the Fisher lobby) and also offers free WiFi. But a new look also means a whole new identity: Stella International Café, so named because when they first opened they served all illy coffee from Italy and Panini sandwiches and had more of an "international" flavor, is now Stella Good Coffee. Over the years they have migrated more towards local producers and now serve their own coffees (roasted by Detroit's century-old Cadillac Coffee Company, with some additional micro blends from Populace Coffee in Bay City). They want this new iteration to be less grab-and-go and more about the coffee itself, reflected in the new name – and so they will serve only pour-over coffee made to order, certainly a much slower process but one much more in keeping with their own philosophies of slow food and slow design (which they joked about being the process by which the new design happened, only to find out it is an actual thing).

"In my architecture background, everything has to be about speed and is pre-planned," Willer says. "Compared to this where it was more an exploration of both our personalities and engaging local artists in the community. It was a slow evolution of the design." Borsay adds, "It took us awhile because we were building it all ourselves … [but with slow design] the quality at the end is actually better. It was almost like clay art; we were molding it as we [went] along."

Another new "slow" product they are excited to offer is their loose-leaf teas sourced directly from China.

But a new name also means a new logo, and this is something the math nerds, not just the design nerds, will enjoy: the new logo incorporates the Moravian star, also known as the Great Stellated (get it?) Rhombicuboctahedron (a complicated geometric form that is meant to represent a three-dimensional image and thus is asymmetrical when drawn flat).

The Stella location inside the Guardian Building will also undergo a similar renovation and rebranding in the coming months, though they won't be closing it as they did the Fisher Building location.

Stella Good Café is celebrating a soft opening starting today, with a grand opening coming later this spring when their lobby chairs arrive.

[Model D] The Roasting Plant now open inside the First National Building

The Roasting Plant is now open inside the First National Building. The space has been totally re-designed from previous tenants (bars The Vine and Enoteca) to accommodate the café setting and their much-buzzed-about high-tech Javabot system, designed to ensure the freshest cup of coffee possible.

This downtown Detroit location is a third location for the company, but the first outside of Manhattan. Elizabeth Rose, Co-Owner of the Roasting Plant, is a native Detroiter who was living in San Diego but got involved with the Roasting Plant in Manhattan and had been planning on moving there when Detroit came calling.

Read more.

[HOT LIST] Coffee (redux)

Anthology at MoCAD.

In EID's first-ever Hot List (June 20, 2011), we took a look at our favorite coffee spots in and around Detroit. This simultaneously prompted a more in-depth piece for Metromode on some of our local roasters, and later a shout-out from yours truly on Curbed Detroit christening Detroit as the new Seattle. (For the record, I said it FIRST.) But so much has changed just in the last year, it's already time to re-visit.

Alas, metro Detroit's growing coffee culture has taken a recent hit with the closing of Thistle Coffeehouse, but the seeds have spread and already two more cafes are positioned to take its place: the Bottom Line in Midtown (opening July 23) and the Roasting Plant in the CBD coming this fall. What many of these places have in common is that they are of the next wave of coffeehouses -- the third wave and beyond. Many roast their own beans in-house and are exquisitely conscious of sourcing; the others may not roast themselves but source beans from some of the top roasters in the country (Stumptown, Intelligentsia) who are themselves known for their exquisite sourcing. What you can take away from all of this is that we sure do brew some good java in this here food desert.

#1 Anthology Coffee (Midtown/Corktown)
They sprung onto the scene as a finalist of the first-ever Hatch Detroit seed funding competition last fall, and are now featured in a regular pop-up at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit as they work on the build-out of their very own permanent location in Corktown. Yes Corktown, where Astro Coffee resides, but one can hardly call it competition when Astro uses Anthology's coffee. Given the ample seating, ease of parking and wholly accessible WiFi at the MoCAD space, if it's Anthology's coffee you seek you should probably just go there, the end. Roaster Josh Longsdorff, who still roasts for Birmingham's Commonwealth as well, is a master craftsman and his coffee is probably the best in Detroit. If you'd like to show your support, they're currently crowd-funding for their new roaster and you can pitch in a few bucks in exchange for some goodies here.

#2 The Great Lakes Coffee Roasting Co. Institute for Advanced Drinking (Midtown) / Torino Espresso + Bar (Ferndale)
How to choose between two places that serve both coffee AND booze??? You don't. Therefore, tie. The IFAD is newly-opened in Midtown and is already my new favorite place ever, which isn't to say I love my old favorite place ever (Torino) any less. The two establishments might both focus on coffee, cocktails and cheese + charcuterie platters, but the similarities end there. The vibes of each space are entirely different: Great Lakes is a little more rustic-modern, like Brooklyn and LA had a baby in Detroit, where Torino is more urban contemporary, Miami by way of the Midwest. Both have great patios. Be sure to check out the IFAD and if you find you can't decide between coffee or beer, they have the perfect daytime transition beverage: the 50/50, half Short's ControversiALE and half cold brew. As for Torino, they're celebrating their one-year anniversary on Sunday, July 29 with a pork party.

Summer galette from Pinwheel.

#3 The Red Hook (Ferndale)
Stumptown Coffee and Pinwheel Bakery. That they ever close is a source of continual sadness, as is the fact I don't live inside. One of the best pour-overs you'll find in all of greater metro Detroit, and also one of the best bakeries with both sweet and savory treats for every craving. And for realsies, all of it is outstanding.

#4 Commonwealth (Birmingham)
Don't let the fancy Birmingham hausfraus fool you, this place is legit. Outstanding coffee (DUH) and exceptional sustainably-sourced food make this pretty much one of the only places worth ever going to Birmingham for. And I also don't hate that parking in the nearby garage is free for the first two hours. If only there were more places worth visiting in that time ... but screw it, Commonwealth FTW.

#5 Germack Coffee Roasting Co. (Eastern Market)
It might sound ridiculous, but until Germack Coffee Roasting Co. opened in Germack's snazzy new digs in Eastern Market, the market had no coffee roaster to call its own. Now Germack, best known for those pink pistachios, has an adorbs cafe (with WiFi!) and store selling items from local producers like Slow Jams Jam and McClure's Pickles, as well as a variety of looseleaf teas and their own house-roasted coffees. The coffee still has a way to go while they hone their skills, but it definitely shows promise and hey, I can walk there, which on certain days makes it the best place in the whole entire world.

Bubbling under Courage Coffee (Hamtramck), Chazzano Coffee Roasters (Ferndale), Cafe Con Leche (SW Detroit), Astro Coffee (Corktown), the Ugly Mug Cafe (Ypsilanti), Comet Coffee (Ann Arbor), Chez Zara (Detroit), 14 East (Midtown), the (espresso) bar (Ann Arbor), the Lab Cafe (Ann Arbor), Zingerman's Coffee (Ann Arbor), HenriettaHaus Coffee Roasters (Ferndale), Renaissance Roastery (Detroit)

 

[EID Feature] Drinking Beer and Telling Tales: IFAD

All photos by Nicole Rupersburg.

I am a teller of stories. It’s the part of this job I enjoy the most, the part that is the most interesting. If you want to know what kind of food a place serves or what it looks like on the inside, there are plenty of other media outlets that will provide that information for you in spades.

If you’d like to know what kind of food and drink is served at the new Great Lakes Coffee Roasting Company bar and café in Midtown, read here.

If you would like to know more about what it looks like on the inside, read here.

Now allow me to tell you a story.

The Great Lakes Coffee Roasting Co. bar (TGLCRC? …alas, a bit cumbersome) – an artisan coffeehouse and craft beer/wine/cocktail bar somewhat cheekily referred to as “The Institute for Advanced Drinking,” or IFAD for short (much better!) – was not a place I had intended on featuring. In my endless quest for ego gratification and the desire to be FIRST, I simply did not feel compelled to add my voice to the chorus that already have and will very soon be singing the praises of this place. If I’m going to write about something EVERYONE else is covering, I’m going to do so way before anyone else does (here, and also here).

And then I visited during the week of their soft open. And I chatted with partner, roastmaster and public personage James Cadariu. And now here I am, despite my aversion to redundancy, writing on the very place I had previously resigned to let every other blogger and writer in town trip over. TGLCRC, IFAD, the Institute … call it what you will, but this place is on another level. This isn’t just another bar with trendy city cred and equal parts hipster and booster appeal. (It is both of those things, but also more.) It is a place to communicate and commiserate, to caffeinate and congregate, to imbibe and indulge. To work. And also play.

James Cadariu is also a storyteller. I had a chance to sit with him at length and get what is ultimately just a glimpse into his mind, but found it a fascinating place to wander around. So here is a little piece of his story; the rest I suggest you discover for yourself by bellying up to the bar and engaging him in conversation. (He’s the guy with the beard, and you’ll know what I mean by that when you see him.)

James started roasting coffee while working as an attorney in wine law (a background which has certainly helped inform the IFAD endeavor). At the time Great Lakes was owned by Greg Miracle and was still importing coffee in addition to roasting it; now they roast and sell only their own and for several years have functioned primarily as a roaster/wholesaler.

Great Lakes started as a retail space in Eastern Market’s Shed 2, when the Eastern Market Corporation began courting independent food businesses and start-ups (and not just farmers). “We came into it backwards,” James says of opening a café after securing a position as what has become easily the largest wholesaler of locally-roasted fair trade organic coffee in metro Detroit.

James, much like the other artisan coffee roasters in metro Detroit who are collectively contributing to the Seattleification of the area, is seeking to undo the damage that was done during the decades of coffee’s commodification, when it was a mass-produced household commodity freeze-dried and shipped in plastic tubs, a product of agricultural industrialization. He wants people to treat it more like wine, to discover its nuances and complexities. The booth in Eastern Market was the first time the Great Lakes staff engaged the customer directly; as they began to foster those direct customer relationships, the idea for a Great Lakes café took root.

He could have opened ‘the Institute’ in Ferndale or Royal Oak, but he wasn’t interested in that. Instead, he connected with “Mayor of Midtown” Sue Mosey, long-time President of the University Cultural Center Association, and had what he jokes is the “traditional experience of driving around in Sue’s Subaru looking at spaces when you’re trying to open a business in Midtown.” It ended up being a serendipitous relationship; Great Lakes is housed in the same building as the Midtown Co-Lab, part of the Woodward Corridor Initiative that will be a long-term evolving project rehabilitating vacant spaces all along the Woodward Corridor. James’s plan is to evolve with them. “The idea of activating a blighted block all at the same time interested me more than just the realm of coffee,” he states. “[These are] the relationships that add value to the drinks. Part of it was planned; part of it has taken on a life of its own.”

He hopes to repeat the same formula with Mosey in the future, opening coffee houses that are community spaces that help shape and build the community around them. “I don’t want to franchise the fuck out of it,” James says firmly. “This is sort of my baby, my vision. We can take this from one blighted area to another. If you have an anchor tenant like this, that brings people in.” He speaks of the traditional coffee house as being a place where people talked, where ideas were exchanged, where relationships were formed. With the Institute he wants to foster a community space where people can come to work (they’ve got WiFi) and meet and talk … and also drink. “I know from planning this business I made more relationships at the corner of Slows’ bar that I would have anywhere else.”

James is most interested in building relationships – with customers, with the community, with the farmers and distributors and winemakers. “As we go through this we have these relationships with the coffee farmers we’re trying to promote … [we’re more interested] in the quality of the product and the relationships [with the people who make it].” He says that they are intentionally being very selective in their approach. “We want to know as many of the people who grow the grapes [and] who make the beer [as we can]. Those relationships have value.”

And those relationships are often born out of the stories behind the places and producers, like wine made from grapes grown on the side of a volcano with no commercial yeast or sulfur dioxide added in. He wants grapes that are sustainably grown, wine that is in its natural state straight from the vine, “not fucked with,” and to be able to manage that whole chain of knowing the grower, the winemaker, the importer, all the way down to the customer. “My relationship with [my] customer is in having all those other things in line … I don’t want it to seem pretentious but we did select these things for a reason.” He says that part of that selectivity is inherent in his business ethos, but “part of it is also because that’s how I want to drink.”

In talking to James it is clear that this is a person who is utterly restless in the best possible way. Words pour out of him with such fluidity that the best you can do is cast a mental net and hope to catch as much as you can. “I would keep getting degrees and never got a job I enjoyed. I had such an odd life…” This is a guy who went to Scotland just to try Scotch because he wanted to learn more about it. “My mom always said it would all come together and it finally feels like it is.”

He is very much the storyteller himself, telling tales peppered with sly one-liners you might miss over the sound of your own blinking – stories of his parents, stories of the city, stories of himself. “Story-telling to me is part of the fabric of any society,” he says. He speaks of old men sitting around a table reminiscing over the way things used to be, and how he loves the idea of the old Irish poet. “Food to me [also] ties into this a lot. Food has this element of bringing people together.” He jokes, “The key to peace in the Middle East is falafel!”

Ultimately James wants the Institute to be a place that helps build community. And not just the community of entrepreneurs and creative types who will inevitably be drawn to the space, but the drinking community as well. And not the SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS drinking community; James seeks to be more civilized. He wants to share these tremendous (and tremendously limited) wines he has sourced, and the quirky coffee-based cocktails they’ve created, and the crazy wild yeast-fermented beers they’ve acquired. “My goal is to expose as many people to these things as possible. I’m not worrying about ‘competition’ but about everybody having good wines so I have somewhere to go … [this is] the agenda of the drinking crowd, not to be pretentious or douchey but just to get better product out there.”

Recently there has been a bit of a surge in craft bars and artisan coffee roasters opening in and around Detroit (Astro Coffee, Sugar House and Anthology, just to name a few), and James welcomes it. “I think that helps the overall culture of this area … we need to collaborate because there’s so much crap out there, and [we need to] be exposing people to [better products] so they’re looking for that.”

James has many ideas for future plans and other things he can do with this concept, and as someone who doesn’t ever seem to rest easy we can be assured it will only be a small matter of time before his next big project. He jokes that no matter what he does, “I would love to have booze anywhere I go. It’s just normal. Why isn’t that true in all parts of life?”

Indeed.

Want to see more? View the Flickr set here.

[Metromode] Bohemian Rhapsody: Metro Detroit's Coffee Chemists

My latest article on Detroit's fast-maturing coffee scene appeared June 23 in Metromode. Here's a taste (or is it a sip?) -- Nicole

If 'Ethiopian Harrar' is an integral part of your early morning ritual, then you already know about Chazzano Coffee in Ferndale. And you also know that when first roasted this particular coffee has notes of juicy blueberry which after a week will evolve to luscious dark chocolate.

''I've created monsters!' jokes Frank Lanzkron-Tamarazo, owner and roaster at Chazzano Coffee. 'They want coffee that's been roasted the same day [so it still has all its flavor profiles]; they'll ask me, "What are you roasting now?" I want people to be crazy about coffee like that and I train the staff to be crazy about coffee like that.'

'In Metro Detroit, the seedlings of a whole new kind of culinary culture have begun to grow.

'Or, more accurately, the beans..."

Read the rest of the article here.

Thistle Coffeehouse: Coffee Culture and Community in Midtown

Nicole Rupersburg

I first heard about Thistle Coffeehouse from Pastor Brenda Jarvis (of Riverside Community Church) and her son Kevin at a large group dinner at the Whitney in October 2009. What they told me sounded too good to be true: a third-wave coffeehouse offering free WiFi, free printing, late-night hours, student art showcases, in DETROIT. I immediately went home and wrote my then-editor at Model D, telling her how exciting it is and how we just have to cover it. This was early on in my business coverage days and I wasn't quite yet aware of the general journalism rules of thumb, which include not covering a business that has no lease, no equipment and no business license, just an enthusiastic idea and some business cards. She let me down easy, saying, "It sounds like heaven. If it ever opens."

Sometimes the truth hurts. Truth is, a lot of people have a lot of ideas. Making them a reality is something different entirely.

A year and a half later, I get a Facebook message from Kevin: "Thistle Coffeehouse now open!"

I'll be damned.

Er. Maybe I should re-phrase that...