El Diablo Coffee

Despite the lovely sleepy aquamarine, electric cucumber green, hot chili red, and stolid orange of the folkloric wall-to-chair-to-table murals of this "offbeat" coffeehouse, I have to say that I rarely come here for coffee. Even when I am in the neighborhood or to meet friends.

Maybe it is "offbeat" for Queen Anne--the new mecca of bourgeois urban hip--, but the atmosphere is decidedly for the young Macy's/Old Navy set.

The times I have come here with a friend, I have invariably been subject to the verbal niaiseries of a young woman having a conversation with a friend--sitting just two feet away--at a volume that could be probably be heard at the Metropolitan Market parking lot.

I am not sure why urban sophistication in Seattle usually equates to a kind of strident, arch laughter mixed with supposedly "really interesting" gossip of no interest to anyone (except possibly the two participants in this frequently re-enacted mise-en-scene).

There is a "French" boulangerie/cafe down the street, but if El Diablo Coffee is any indication, the former is about as authentically Parisian as the latter is close geographically to Buenos Aires.

But then Queen Anne ever since the old neighborhood mom-and-pops were demolished to make way for some true half-block-long architectural monstrosities--small-scale--has become a place for the new [young] ladies who lunch.

Some people think that to impress others they need to speak, snort, and laugh as boisterously and shrilly as possible. This serves at the same time to draw the widest possible audience ("Look, everyone, at how amusing we indeed are!").

It passes apparently, too, for sophistication, charm, and intelligence.

In fact, there are places to have an actual conversation. Between two people rather than between two persons and everyone else in the coffeehouse, who are trapped listening.

El Diablo is, unfortunately, not one of them. (Cafe Petitrusso on Capitol Hill, the Macrina in West Queen Anne, or even the Top Doughnuts on Summit E.. are).

But have your hip and sip it, too, I say.

[The young racist African-American barista is still there, too*].

* Yes, blacks can be racist. It would take a very prejudiced mind to insist that people of color cannot be racist,and certainly, not African-Americans.


7/19/2010

This is my neighborhood coffee house so sometimes I do stop in. The fact that it is NOT a Starbuck's or a Tully's is a big plus (+). The coffee is passable.

Everything--tables, walls, chairs--is covered in hand-painted fiery orange, tomato red, lemon yellow, sky blue, electric lime-green, and/or somnolent turquoise folk motifs, from vine tendrils to prancing diablos. A little bit of Havana (or is it Guadalajara?) in cold, rainy, overcast Seattle.

But I hadn't didn't realized until this afternoon that coffee at El Diablo now comes with plenty of "attitude":

"Excuse me. Do you have a restroom?"

"Yeah"

(Silence. Pause).

"Could I borrow the key to it?"

The barista, whom I have never seen before, a young African-American man, throws the key on the counter. He also gives me a very creepy "dirty look" that I will probably never be able to forget.

If a person does not want to deal with people of a different race or ethnicity (Asian, Latino, and occasionally, depending on mood, white), s/he should not work in an establishment where s/he will encounter them as customers.