Coffee & crepes: YesYes!
So apparently the YesYes will be closing down. Olympia will be (yet again) losing a great all-ages concert venue/community space. This seems to happen every few years here. Remember the Arrowspace? The Alamo? Praxis? The Liberation Cafe? Tropicana? The list goes on.
Meanwhile we are still looking for a decent place to have a cup of coffee. Batdorf and Bronson lost all its charm when it moved across the street, and let's face it: it was never that charming to begin with.
We haven't had a really great, really Olympia coffee shop since the Smithfield. We need a place where coffee costs a dollar. Where not only is it "bus-your-own", but you can grab a bar towel and wipe up your own spills, too. Where people go to play chess with random strangers and write poetry on napkins. Where teenagers sit around playing guitar. Where crazy people spread out their wares on the formica tables and no one tells them to leave and people do weird performance art peices and people bug you for money and they have open mikes on Thursdays and AA meetings on Tuesdays. Whatever happened to those places? They used to be a dime-a-dozen. We don't need another place with Italian blown-glass light fixtures and brushed metal countertops and snotty baristas and $4.00 mochas. Enough is enough, Olympia.
Oh yeah, and you know what else it should have? Crepes.
We should have done this at the YesYes! Somebody should have opened up folding tables and chairs and broke out the air pots and a hot plate between 7AM and 7Pm and we could have paid the rent with coffee and crepes, and finally, after practically two decades, there'd be somewhere good to get a cup of coffee in Olympia!!!
posted by Jade at 6:15 PM
3 Comments:
Having only been in Olympia for little over two years, I feel the "Place to get Coffee".
In the U-District (as long as we're talking college towns)it's called the Solstice. Nowhere had that feel and authentic delicious coffee. And right nect door is a brewery, and about 50 small resteraunts and eateries.
Part of the Crepes and coffee idea though? would definently have to be the places to eat nearby. I really can't stand having three or four mediochre places to eat next to ehre I'm getting my fix.
Spar, Otto's, Darby's.... ish.
None has a specialty item to -draw- folks in.
And the only place downtown to get a good french press? Cafe Vita. Why nowhere else?
The old Java Flow by the transit center was not bad for the things you mentioned, way over priced, to be sure, but in the right spirit. I guess it all comes down to the fact that retail space is just so expensive in Oly and you have to gouge the people just to make your nut. Same thing goes with the Farmer's Market. Cherries in particular. I can get the exact same cherries for half the price at some road side stands. Even in Hawks Prairie I can get them for at least a buck a pound less. Sadly, Oly is an expensive place to do business and an easy place to get poorer. I think B&B has become kind of sucky but it beats the alternative. Maybe the best thing to do is to set up a tax exempt non profit to set up such a facility, with the social services as the emphasis, and the buck a coffee and crepe as the funding mechanism.
Yeah, the old Java Flow was great. I used to go there for coffee and Pop Tarts. (Cool!) That's actually the place that really put downtown on the map for me when I was a young teen. The open mikes were how I broke onto the downtown scene.
It never really felt like the hub though. That's something I'd really like to see someone sucessfully appropriate from B&B. What would it take, folks? Leather couches and a fireplace?
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