There and Back

I closed the cafe last week. As we started making preparations for the markets, it became clear that it would be difficult to keep staffing it and supplying it with our regular summer routine in gear. To make it work I would have had to hire a stranger, and if I hired a stranger I would have had to count the money every day.

It was a difficult location. Some people make restaurants and coffeeshops work at difficult locations, in fact, there's a successful restaurant right across the street. But a place that works in a difficult location either has to be a destination place or it has to really connect with its neighborhood. I really just wanted to have a place that was convenient for us to run and convenient for customers to support, but it didn't happen that way on either end.

I learned that I'm not cut out for the coffee business. There's an appalling amount of waste in the coffee business. You have to pull shots and throw them away at the beginning of each day to make sure the grinder setting is right for the atmospheric conditions. The coffee coming out of the grinder flies all over the place. The machine is set up to pull two shots at a time, so if someone orders a single shot you just throw away the extra one. Everything about the process has to be perfect, from the size of the grind to the timing and the temperature, and sometimes shots don't come out right and you can't even identify the reason. But if the shot isn't perfect you have to throw it away because this is a coffee kind of town.

My employees who had worked in the coffee industry for a long time took this in stride. I've basically built my farmers' market business around strategies for reducing waste, so I was horrified. We used organic, fair trade coffee but I couldn't help thinking about all the coffeeshops wasting all that coffee that was produced at terrible human and environmental costs.

We did have an opportunity to launch the Humble Feast dinners at the cafe location, and we're going to keep doing them there for now and eventually move them to community centers around town. I've wanted to do these dinners for years, and I'm thrilled to have gotten the endeavor off the ground. Maybe that was the deeper reason why I attempted this quixotic venture.

I keep hearing people expressing their condolences but I've actually felt so much lighter since I closed the place. Today is opening day at the Columbia City Market. This is the nature of business. You try things. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. You brush yourself off and you move on.