Searching for the Perfect Coffee Shop: Part 1

I do most of my work in coffee shops in and around Austin, Texas.  With the exception of occasional visits to my favorite libraries and days I work from home (usually impossible with a three year old), I’m a regular fixture at a half-dozen coffee shops and a recurring visitor at many others.  Discovering a new coffee shop to me is like Columbus setting foot on the New World.  It’s an adventure every time.  The perfect coffee shop is an elusive animal, not quite so reclusive as the Holy Grail but still shy and crafty.

As the world’s foremost authority on coffee shops, as voted by the readers of “World’s Foremost Authority” magazine, I can assure you that I have the education and experience necessary to foist my criteria on you.  In order to find the perfect coffee shop, we must first list the qualifications that the perfect coffee shop must have.  What should you look for?  In my next few blogs, I intend to provide you with my criteria, along with my rankings.  Here’s the first third of my list:

1. The most obvious qualification, and one it’s hard to fail at, is they must have great coffee.  I haven’t been in a coffee shop that has just plain bad coffee.  Nobody’s serving freeze-dried Nescafé these days (though I still keep a jar in the freezer).  Everyone has some variation on organic, fair trade, or specialty bean that they’re more than willing to overcharge you for.  Most get this right.
2. This next is critical: they have to know how to make a latte.  For you ignorant baristas out there, a latte is not a cappuccino: it doesn’t have foam.  It also is not served lukewarm.  I prefer my coffee scalding.  If it doesn’t burn the roof of my mouth, it’s a complete failure.  Get it right!  Just the other day, I was at one of my favorite coffee shops that made both mistakes at once.  Normally, they’d be out of my rotation for a long stretch.  Lucky for them, in their case I made an exception.  They’re on probation.  Next time they make my latte, I’m going to watch them like I’d watch a shyster shuffling a marked deck.
3. Water.  They should provide a carafe of cold water with a stack of plastic glasses beside it.  Why is it so many coffee shops fail this standard?  Do they want me to beg for water?  Expect me to crawl to the counter on my hands and knees like it’s an oasis in the middle of the desert?  Several even expect you to pay for a bottle of overpriced fancy water.  That’s not an alternative.  I’d rather take my empty coffee cup into the bathroom and fill it with tap water.  This is another sore point for me.
4. Wi-Fi: if you expect my posterior to grace your establishment, you’re going to have to provide me with free Wi-Fi.  Don’t deceive yourself into thinking your pastel interior and currant scones will be enough for me.  I want screaming fast service.  Make sure I have it.  And it better be free!  I don’t want to have to buy another latte every two hours, because you have some arbitrary limit designed to screw me out of another $4.25.  And and, how dare you turn the Wi-Fi off at five o’clock?  Oh, you want to turn over the clientele and become a happening bar?  I’ve got news for you: my rump is sticking to that fat lounger in the corner regardless.  Just try to get rid of me.
5. Since this is the quest for the perfect coffee shop, I have to add this criterion: a punch card.  Did I mention I’m cheap?  If I’ve drunk ten coffees at your shop, I’d like a reward for my loyalty.  It’s time for a buy-back, barkeep.  Let me add your card to my growing stack of punch cards.  If I could fit them in my wallet I would, but I have too many.  I need a separate business card holder.
6. Tolerable music at a tolerable volume: on your own time, you may like to blast the latest hip-hop fiasco at ear-splitting volumes, but take pity on the rest of us.  Have a little compassion.  Turn it down or turn it off.  For future reference, I’d like to hear classical or jazz, but I’m also open to older country.  In the afternoons, a little pop works fine, but nothing from the last two decades, the eighties the latest.  Set the volume to a gentle level: it should mist the air like a lady’s perfume.

I know many of you owners are quivering with dread at the rest of my criteria, but mull these for a week and let me know what you think.

Next week: the next six criteria.