Business Tue Oct 02 2007

Waiting for the Beauty

During the Andersonville Dessert Crawl toward the end of September, I had a chance to get a glimpse of the Coffee Studio, a yet-to-open high-quality coffee shop in the northern fringe of Andersonville. In a word, the experience was stunning. The deep, narrow space that combines exposed brick walls and beautiful natural wood, was comfortably strewn with simple, clean furniture. A white, low-hanging ceiling in the middle gave the space an even stronger sense of depth and coherence. It was beautiful. (For the unfortunate who didn't make it to the Crawl, their blog has a few photos of the beautiful interior.) And the coffee they offered as a part of the Crawl was fantastic.

It was Intelligentsia's Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, which (shamefully) we'd never tried before. It seemed that the owner-baristas brought out the Ethiopian Y's (as we called the unpronounceable beans) incredible floral note to the fullest. That floral and citrusy first note was so pronounced that I at first thought my palate might have been off, because of all the sugar intake up to that point (remember, it was a dessert crawl), but that was how the amazing coffee really tasted. After having been accustomed to Metropolis' and Intelligentsia's good-quality coffee varieties, I honestly didn't think that I would be blown away again with coffee, but here I was, burbling my amazement rather redundantly to Miguel (one of the owner-baristas), who patiently shared with me his excitement with the coffee. They know what they're doing with their coffee, that's for sure.

According to them, the Coffee Studio hopes to open its doors to the public in a few weeks, when they get all the utilities hooked up, etc. Given the oh-I-could-sit-here-all-day-long interior and the extremely good coffee they brew, I'm finding it rather difficult to wait for the X day. Even more difficult, once the day comes, would be to not go there every day just to be in that space with a blank, euphoric stare.

— Yu Kizawa / Comments (1)