Waking up

Whenever I pass through Milwaukee I try to make a point of stopping at Alterra, a local chain (I don’t think there are even any outside the city) with the usual racks of fair trade and organic coffees. For a short trip there’s always the kiosk in the Milwaukee airport that took over a former Starbucks -- I want to say there was a lawsuit, but I might be exaggerating -- from where my much needed dark chocolate mocha came from as I sit here drinking and experimentally wagging my eyebrows up and down in a desperate attempt to snap to. (A woman just asked me where my flight was going and I said “Milwaukee… blaaaaat… New York,” blaaaaat apparently being the voice I make now when I’m buzzing myself for an error.)

My love for Alterra is pretty recent; I wasn’t cool enough in high school to hang out there and I definitely never insisted my mom switch to fair trade. I would love them to open in New York so I could do that, but they would probably get killed. I worry a lot more about the fate of my favorite local coffee places since I read GROUND UP, Michael Idov’s novel about a doomed-from-the-start Lower East Side café. The author makes clear that it was ill-fated, as his optimistic narrator and his wife take out a loan against her trust fund to lease a space once occupied by a gourmet hot-dog seller (!!) to create a coffee shop like the ones they loved in Vienna, where a drink would be an experience. They would do it right, not bend to what the clueless consumers think they want. They comparison shop for their blend and court the neighbors. They go broke at first slowly, and then rapidly.

Idov wrote the novel following a well received piece in Slate about, yes, his ill-fated Lower East Side café and why it was doomed to fail. I hadn’t read it recently before I started GROUND UP and I don’t really want to believe it’s autobiographical, particularly as the failing shop takes a painful toll on the owners’ marriage. At times it must have been a painful book to write, but the sheer volume of information he feeds into the plot, perhaps useless to him in his daily life now, allows him a second wind of expertise.

I liked that GROUND UP was a sort of rallying cry for the idea of independent coffee shops, while establishing that connoisseurship and entrepreneurship are two different animals, that some enterprises fail due to dumb chance and that some people have no business with business. It was also a very funny book, considering how bleakly it ends. (In a subplot, a coffee chain suspiciously similar to Caribou opens up across the street, and its manager, frequenting his neighborhood store, develops a pointed crush on the narrator’s wife.) And if I needed a reason to drink more coffee, well, here it is.