Into the Umisphere

We favour coffeehouses that feed the soul. This is, after all, an artistic inquiry, and art is about soul. Umi, on Chinatown's fringes at Somerset and Percy, satisfies.

You can often discern much about coffee joints from their design ethos. (So much depends/on a red wheelbarrow...*) Starbucks artfully camouflages a cookie-cutter tendency, yet all outlets bear the stamp of centralized corporate design dicta. Second Cup, ditto except on a smaller budget. Locally, Bridgehead differentiates itself with a slightly self-conscious blend of environmental hipness and industrial cool, shifting its semi-standard palette of design elements from outlet to outlet.

Umi is a bohemian one-off (our blog friend Robin K gently labels it 'screwy'), mainly pouring very good Central American beans (decafs are fresh-pulled Americanos). Gauzy deep blue drapes set off sunset orange walls. There's a library of well worn books, odd potted plants, a counter with a view onto the street (and into the Tang Coin Laundry). Wall art blends ironic feather-bedaubed black velvet with more serious oils. An aged white piano is in one corner, a neat stack of amplifiers and microphone stands in another, for weekend open stages. The effect is more chaotic than in the big chains, and yet, for us, more comfortably lived-in. The look is of evolving creativity.

People who go out to drink coffee, we find, gravitate toward reflections of their mental self-images. Of a morning, you'll find the well-dressed "grab some jet fuel and swoosh downtown to work" types at Second Cup and Starbucks. Table customers' lappies tend to be Windows machines. Those at Bridgehead tend to dress in earthier fashionable garb and often linger a bit longer, lined up with their backs to the walls to better display their mating plumage: white MacBooks, MacBook Pros for alpha types.

Uminauts can sometimes observe daring new mommies with ute-strollers, speaking of their husbands' rises in the Tory hierarchy, but the Umi look biases heavily toward 'urban artist'. Clothes are fashionable after their own fashion, but often not in the sense of any current designer other than the wearer. Laptops are in evidence, but there's less emphasis on WiFi Wanker brand flashing. From a scuffed duffle a riotgrrl may pull out a machine swathed in asymmetrical duct tape, as much to nullify a logo as to to strap it together.

Feeding one's soul aside, actual food items also reflect differing sensibilities. Starbucks caters to a distressing Americanized proclivity to vastly oversweeten everything, and make it huge. Bridgehead's treats are less sickly sweet, and sandwiches comprise earthy breads and creative fillings, often vegetarian. Umi's do too. But the real grabbers are the unassuming looking little dark chocolate with jalapeño cookies, in a basket near the cash register. They set off coffee in a way that is liable to knock your socks off if you care about details. We do.

Umi's open stages bear mention: they're higher-energy than any similar events we've seen in years. Artists and sell-out crowds are bright-eyed yet relaxed. Bands, soloists, poets and other spoken word artists, in any style you want, and just about all of it exciting and good. We like that musicians and crowds separated by less than a metre interact freely, supportively and humourously. We like that poets are applauded with loud finger-snapping. We like that Umi's counter staff can be coaxed out to perform a very credible spoken word/urban music rap. We also like the fact that everybody there, performer and watcher, is palpably excited about new art being made in real time. Umi is a hot medium. That's cool by us.

Caffeine IV: Strange Brew

Second Cup has been on the Canadian upscale coffee scene since 1975, with mixed success. Perhaps it comes by its name because it gets things half-right, so needs two cups to fill expectations. In general, the Second Cup experience falls somewhere between Starbucks and Tim Hortons. It sells coffee at upscale prices, but pinches pennies obviously - a cabal of stringent bean counters offering astringent beans.

Since the early part of this decade, it's been owned first by Cara Operations - caterer to students and airlines - and later something called Dinecorp Hospitality, headed by a former Cara CEO. The affiliations may not inspire confidence among current and former Cara-feteria diners, aware of Cara's parsimony. Food was all 'bidness' and mouths were mere units. So, Cara and luxury coffee may appear to be a schizophrenic match, and in fact the Second Cup experience reflects this in some ways.

In Ottawa, the chain often matches Starbucks outlets corner for street corner, but seems to be trying to do it on a more restrained budget. Certainly Second Cups have the the iconic large espresso pumps, and many are possessed of large potted plants and big comfy chairs grouped around gas fireplaces. These are nice touches for people looking for a cosy little upscale experience for the price of a coffee. Inside, correct colours have been carefully selected by decorating consultants, staff are personable, but the spaces remain feeling barer and acoustically more live than is desirable. For the Ultra Cosmic Top Sekrit Project to succeed, acoustics are important. The Second Cup's distract. True luxury enfolds one in discrete muting. If one accepts the proposition that upscale is warm, the gestalt here is cooler than it should be, even for Marshall McLuhan.

And Second Cup's current logo, like its retail spaces, sports a somewhat stripped feel. Earlier logo iterations were gold leaf on darker backgrounds, often in three-dimensional carved wood. Artistically, they looked edgier and more stylized. An interim version attempted to duplicate the wood in thick Styrofoam. Closer than, say, five metres, it looked like the cheese it was. The current minimalist version is a one-dimensional, bland, over-homogenized pabulum of commercial art cliches that substitutes painted drop shadows for actual depth.

SC's trademark brew bouquet is emblematic also: it's a lighter roast than that favoured by Starbucks - thinner-bodied, fruitier and more acidic on the palate. In earlier times, espresso drinks sometimes tasted of coffee tinted dishwater, rather than the requisite velvet darkness, because baristas drew so inconsistently. Latter-day coffee machines may have cured this, but as in the case of Starbucks, automation reduces the luxurious sense that a skilled artisan is crafting a small treasure just for you.

Caffeine II: Veni, vidi, vici... venti?

Lately, Starbucks' exponential race toward world coffee domination has reached the point of satire. It was driven early on by roasts dark as sin, giant manual Gaggia espresso pumps, shops staged in earthy siennas, browns and oranges, and attitude heavy baristas. All lent whiffs of fashion forward luxury and edginess. Lately, as company stock dividends have plateaued, these have been augmented with in-house music production and distribution, and an array of rather costly stainless coffee toys.

The jury remains out on whether Starbucks' putative 'culture' may have diversified to the point of dilution. Although the charming-looking little gray-haired lady who reads newspapers all the time and the tattooed guy with pink hair and skintight low-rise jeans remain dedicated habitués of the Elgin Street store (pictured above), they cannot themselves comprise a culture.

The retro mermaid woodcut logo adds a siren call to a coffee demographic more upscale than Tim Horton's lowbrow target. It lends the company image weight, and a soupçon of the history it does not actually possess. It has also been carefully (and not altogether successfully) bowdlerized and Disneyfied over the years, de-emphasizing its racier aspects. She's a siren! Selling small sins! Why neuter her?












For the record, Tim Horton's kitschy mid-20th-century badging style is fully appropriate to a company that opened its first outlet in 1964 - seven years before Starbuck became anything beyond first mate on the Pequod.

Starbucks trademark dark roast borders on smokey and burnt. Appropriate to an oily espresso or French brew, it has not made a fan of every palate, especially those acclimated to venerable supermarket can coffees like Maxwell House, Edwards and Nabob.

Yet the heart of that dark roast, like the mermaid, hints at more exotic mythical depth than an ex-hockey player's retirement plan. At least if you're not Canadian. Tim's still claims to be bigger here. Its prosaic ethos packs gladly into a lunch bucket thermos, but Starbucks sells a mystical experience supposed to be worth paying for and waiting for, rather than quickly-slung cups of joe and deep-fried sugar pastries. Naturally, one pays extra for coffee positioned as an acceptable indulgence, with just enough of an air of lingering sin to make it enticing. The aroma is equal parts over-roasted coffee and imagined brimstone.

Minimum-wage baristas these days are not overly knowledgeable about the coffees they purvey. Nor can many any longer draw a proper espresso unassisted. The corporation opted some time ago to automate its espresso machines in the name of chain-wide drink uniformity. Although... Starbucks' chairman and returning CEO, Howard Schultz, has belatedly realized that quasi-artisanal coffee craft may also have had something to do with the chain's growth. It's a bitch trying to appear exclusive and emulate McDonalds at the same time...

Caffeine: double double or nothing?

Before we get the Ultra Cosmic Top SeKrit Project fully underway, we're going to need caffeine. And if we're going to need caffeine in Ottawa, Tim Hortons is a starting option. It's been considered the quintessential Canadian coffee chain for years, even when it briefly was owned by American interests. (How Canadian is that?) The furniture is hard, the ambience is fluorescent, the coffee is on the slightly better side of 'lousy'. What it's got going for it is donuts, urban ubiquity, a lot of 24-hour drive-by windows, and a population that loves it. The oddly corporate-looking Wikipedia entry mentions, apparently without irony, a Tim Hortons Culture.

Why? Because it's Spartan but serviceable, perhaps a submerged reflection of the country's Protestant ascetic stock. Protestants are far from the only patrons these days, but the mainstream Canadian ethos remains, at heart, no-frills and unfussy. The coffee may be lousy, but it's fresh, cheap, hot and highly caffeinated. If you order it predoctored with enough no-extra-cost cream and sugar - the famed 'double-double' - it's palatable enough to goose a groggy brain toward sentience for a kid's Peewee hockey practice at 5:00 AM, a sunrise departure to cottage country, or a red eye, cross-country barn-burner of a road trip.

Despite the fact that many in the thrifty Timmy's tribe may snicker at the prices Starbuckians will ante up for a 'coffee beverage' such as the decafnonfatnofoamskinnysoylatte, the two almost-separate demographics share an important commonality: the insider's off-the-posted-menu SeKrit Sign. Whether it's a doubledouble or a decafnonfatnofoamskinnysoylatte, only those in the know can order without the words tripping on hesitant lips. Knowledge of each is acquired only by observing other, more senior adepts and acolytes of the order. Each in its milieu is the caffeinista's equivalent of a Masonic handshake. And almost everybody wants to feel they belong somewhere...