A Perfect Cup of Coffee in the Neighborhood

I counted them. There are eight places to get coffee in my urban, roughly-intellectual neighborhood in St. Louis. The Central West End has a lot of the first-class attributes of a cosmopolitan city without bearing any of the really awful features of a metropolis.

My girlfriend and I live within five blocks of all eight places. I hesitate to call them all coffee houses as that term should mean something even if it usually does not. I work at one of them: The St. Louis Bread Company, which despite the name and location of its headquarters is a company (Panera Bread) with 414 stores across the country. It is what is known in the business as a quick-casual restaurant. Two of the other coffee shops in the neighborhood fit this description (Strata and Einstein's Bagels), and while their food is pretty good their coffee is always merely so-so. (The quick-casual restaurant, by the way, is taking market share away from fast-food companies.)

Working there from 6 until 10am has given me a different perspective on morning coffee. I have begun to see myself as a nursemaid, giving people suffering from the personality disorder of having just awakened a medicine which will cure them of their illness. I know that they know they are sick because they come back every day for the same medicine. I wondered where the best medicine was in my neighborhood, so I decided to take a look.

It turns out, magically, that my favorite place to get coffee is also the closest: Marty's Café at Left Bank. It is adjacent to Left Bank Books, St. Louis' only independent full service bookstore. Although it's not the hippest place in the neighborhood to get coffee (we will get to that one in a minute), it feels the most intellectual. Most important, however, they have the best coffee. They brew Kaldi's, coffee but somehow they brew it better than Kaldi's does. I don't know how that's possible, but I like the way it sounds. They also sell a fair amount of wine for your reading enjoyment.

There are two equally hip, but vastly different, coffee houses in the Central West End: The Coffee Cartel and The Grind. The hippest thing about the Coffee Cartel is that it is open 24 hours a day. The scene is late-night, hopping, and gay. However, the coffee is not very good. But they have a wide variety of specialty coffee drinks, ice cream, and donuts, which sort of makes up for their mediocre brew. And they are locally owned which gives them a certain cachet among anti-establishmentarians. They are hip, technologically savvy, urban, and electric.

To complement the Coffee Cartel, the Grind is right down Maryland Avenue. It is filled with overstuffed couches, nooks, crannies, really good coffee, funky art, and smoke, lots of smoke. Whereas the Coffee Cartel is frequented by the hipster, the Grind is frequented by the all-night student who just drifted over from nearby Washington University. Yes, many who come to the Grind fit the description of the sketchy graduate student, but at least they care about knowledge and a great cup of coffee. My friend Jeff loves it there because you can smoke inside. Mark loves it because you can sit a really long time with a great Americano. My own favorite is the Café Sua Da. It is a traditional Vietnamese iced coffee which consists of dark coffee dripped into sweetened condensed milk, stirred at one's leisure, and poured over ice. It is both refreshing and filling on hot Midwestern days. For my everyday coffee I usually go to Marty's, but when I want to feel cool I go to the Cartel or the Grind.

Of course, there is a Starbucks in the Central West End. I won't go into any games about Starbucks. But they brew good coffee and they sell (but very unfortunately do not brew) organic fair trade coffee. I'll admit to frequenting Starbucks when my favorite coffee houses are not open and I need better coffee than they brew at the Coffee Cartel.

The state of coffee in the Central West End is pretty wonderful. There is somewhere to get coffee no matter what your mood or disposition. But for my money I usually frequent Marty's or the Grind.

Francis Raven