What this town needs is a good sixty cent cup of coffee

If I were handed a TrickyDick $300 FunBill, I would go out and try to drink 100 cups of coffee. I would fail. I would fail because, in this life, $3 coffee means the cheapest, grimiest coffee, doesn’t it? It means you spent three bucks at a gas station. It means you wasted three bucks on coffee that you won’t get around to choking down. If you have three hundred dollars and want to drink one hundred cups of coffee, your option is to make it yourself.
But not really. The fact is, there exists in Austin, a cup of coffee that runs you under a buck. I mean to find as many as I can. I mean to obtain them. I mean to try them.

Part 1: Cheating On a Halo, Also, on a Challenge

The Wells Branch Community Library

For my first trick, I shall need a volunteer from the Library. I shall need him (or her!) to go to the Wells Branch Community Library just off Wells Port Drive and obtain the first of my Cheap Coffee Cuest objects.

Library Coffee might not count. It costs exactly a dollar, though, which is what makes it my choice for first cup. They don’t actually make it there, per se. It comes from a machine. You put a little pouch bag into the device and it presses water through it, and piddles into the cup.

The library’s nice, though. I vote  that it’s the nicest library on or very near Wells Port Drive.

Take that, Pflugerville Library!

Next time: Coffee that comes from a food purveyor and costs less than a dollar. Excitement!

Red River Cafe

Stop a while and enjoy an egg

linq:Red River Cafe’s Facebook

I am not, by my nature, a morning person. I have recently acquired a “baby,” the 2009 model, which asserts that I am now to become one.  I certainly do not mind, but I do miss my status as a frequent patron of night spots. Solace, though, exists, in the form of several really excellent morning spots. I shall endeavor to speak on the subject of them.

My first experience with Red River Cafe was, as seems appropriate now, years and years ago. I was lost, the place isn’t on Red River Street, and the booths are a little small for my girthy taste. Whether my business that day was fell or not, I have attached dire overtones to it, although the details remain sketchy. I was young, and did not yet understand that this is almost the textbook definition of charm.

The corner table I chose today, for I remain a man of size, and the booths still run a little small.

I have, in my life, always had difficulty identifying charm, usually until the opportunity is so far gone as to make the point completely moot. I have been lucky to be allowed by the universe to take a moment and appreciate the really great place that is the Red River Cafe.

If it will be of any benefit to you, please, allow me to give you what pointers my massive ego and scant wisdom will allow.

Red River Cafe is not a place to go when you just want to grab a quick burger and run. Because the staff is composed of nice people and because the chef is willing, they will indulge you in this desire, but you will be missing the point. It is not a place to go get your breakfast burrito fix and dash to class, although they make a fine pair of burritos, and you do have class in, like, six minutes. This, too, is not the way to enjoy the place.

Budget your time. Allow a solid hour. Sit at a table and read your Chronicle or Statesman or Times or Post or Tribune or Journal or whichever other of the Old Form Papers still exist in this digital age, or if you must, your online datastreaming whatever thingummy, in the morning, and savor your eggs, in all their glorious splendor, or your burger or your pancakes or your taco. Order by placing a blind finger at random on the menu, and rest assured, you will receive food and you will be allowed to observe the cadence of the morning. Sit at your skinny booth and watch the light move across the counter. Drink your coffee and ask for refills. Do not be in a hurry.

Inside the café, taken with pure, uncut leisure

Hurrying your Red River Cafe experience is like telling your grandma you want that goddamn lace tatted right now, or it’s her ass.

Sure, you could, and you’d probably get what you asked for quickly, and because everybody around here is nice, nobody will give you the poke in the snout you deserve, but why do it? Take your time. You don’t often get an opportunity to really enjoy a thing as pedestrian and indulgent as breakfast, nor as simple and transcendent as a place that is well-loved by its clientele. Go ahead. I won’t tell your sharkskin classmates.

Five minutes to twelve

Genuine Joe’s Coffeehouse

Rollin’ down the street, smokin’ Endust, sippin’ on Genuine Joe’s.

Linq: Joe’s

My experience at Genuine Joe’s is ruined. It will never be the same. If I were one of those sappy types who sighs in text, I might very well insert one here. You’ll have to imagine it, though, because I’m not one of them.

The building is a converted house. It runs very long, and seats plenty, which is a pleasant change. Parking is ample. The patio is well-appointed and open. Even when the place is full of children, as today, the noise level is not overpowering. Their physical plant is absolutely acceptable.

The iced black tea is fresh, today, with a floral aroma that speaks to proper brewing. The flavor of the tea is allowed to exist, in spite of its handling by humans. It is a frankly delicate affair, and it holds up to slow sipping. I’m not an adorner of beverages, but my palate suggests that it might benefit from the judicious application of honey or sugar, and even stand up to their artificial cousins.

The coffee is Austin coffee. This is a tetchy subject, and I don’t want to get deeply into it here, but it’s what you get when you order coffee here in town. It’s black as hell and brewed too strong and too hot, and it comes out tasting like Austin coffee. My theory is that, in Austin, we do not like coffee, we like coffee beverages with cream and sugar. I have yet to be proven decisively wrong by a coffee shop or restaurant experience. Take it for what it is: a snobbish opinion from a budding coffee snob.

Their selection of baked goods is external and unremarkable. It’s fresh, or it has been every time I’ve been here, and that is several times. Will this be the final time? Maybe.

Because, my experience here has become polluted, as experiences inevitably do. By a plate.

I tried to take a picture, but it does not appear in photographs. I tried to reassemble it in a popular photo program, but the horror does not, as horror so often does not, translate. It is a plate, depicting a cartoony coffee pot. In no fewer than seven different fonts is the phrase (the quotation marks are on the plate) “The PERKS are BEST here”

I shudder at the thought. Each word, and the quotation marks in an additional two. Yick.

The rest of the wall hangings, although often puzzling, are not so troubling to the soul. The half board game on the wall of the sitting room, off the main, is nifty but useless, hanging as it does cockeyed on the wall. The Gulf G in the main room over the fireplace is a fine touch, hanging as it does, in the classic pose, rampant over three green frogs bearing the same initial.

But that plate, it ruins the whole experience for me. I hate to be in the room with it, and now that I’ve seen it, I can’t remove it from the edge of my vision, following and taunting me throughout my experience. Ah, well.

24% “Apple’s”, 36% “Orange’s”