A friend recently reviewed the coffee shops in Manhattan, Kansas and asked for opinions about which place was best, and why. I am still waiting for something akin to a coffee place I frequented in Mukilteo, Washington until it was bought out by a larger company. Would someone please build a place like this here (right after a real bread bakery). I found this piece that I wrote about it in 2002. What was I thinking? I obviously had had too much caffeine. –LA
Twice a week I endure ferry coffee, sparse but smoky as a liquid appetizer that whets my appetite for something more: the java that fulfills my platonic quest for the ideal, or at least something a little better, in the way of a cup of coffee at the Mukilteo Coffee Co. The quest takes more effort than the twenty-minute sailing from Whidbey Island to Mukilteo. After the ferry ride I climb a hill that is about three blocks high and seems steep, but you must remember I live, love, and write at sea level, from which Mount Rainier appears as formidible as K2. I’m not sure the dark roast, or Mukcoff, as one of my friends calls it, served up at my destination greatly exceeds the quality of the ancient Starbucks brew available on the ferry, but there is something about the atmosphere of the cafe serving it that preserves the body and aroma in the memory:You must remember this…
There are too many baristas for the Monday morning crowd, and servers hide behind the glass counter, which is filled with cinnamon rolls and cheese danishes. The architects of this space (if there were any) designed a nearly perfect boxy recess in the back of the store, in which the minimum-wage workers are quarantined from the tired patrons.
This is one of my favorite places, not unlike an updated Rick’s Cafe. Unlike that Casablanca estalishment, this place does not serve liquor (as far as I can tell), and offers piped music from CDs rather than Sam at piano. There is no Bogie or Bergman here, but the pathos is nevertheless derived from the patrons, most of whom seem to be seniors (at least on Monday and Wednesday mornings). Fake antique metal signs that advertise extinct or fictional products hang askew on the eggplant walls of this Sound-side sanctuary, but I am not convinced that this has drawn them except for the fact that this “third place” is a wonderful illustration of the triumph of the outsider. The dusty-haired majority gather here daily to live life, rather than theorize about it. They speak with humor about its futility, yet do not avoid their fate because they come day after day, almost daring the inevitable.
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