From the Archive: On Coffee & Gezellig
This entry is one I wrote a few years ago, on the night my favorite hometown haunt closed shop. With the new site, it’s not on the Internet anywhere, so I figured it deserved another home. Enjoy!
Originally published on May 31, 2015.
Gezellig is a Dutch word I've known for a few years now; it's maybe the only one I could honestly say I've internalized. One of my best friends speaks the language and has mentioned that there's no way to translate it into English, but it could be used to describe an atmosphere of comfort, of warmth, of friendliness. In all the time that I've known that word, there's been one place truly worthy of that ascription.
Caffé Espresso, a hallmark of Green Bay's culture and - as far as I'm concerned - the centerpiece of the downtown area, closed yesterday. Just reading those words breaks my heart in a profound and blistering way, a sequence of words I genuinely thought I'd never have to read, much less type out.
A history lesson and some scant few memories are all I have to offer the sacrificial altar where many a cup of coffee once lay. Caffé opened at 119 S. Washington Street in 1983 under Jaime Wilson, a kind man I've only ever talked to a handful of times. He's always sported a smile and never shooed away the ratty high-schoolers that crowded up his hightop tables for hours at a time, ordering nothing more than a $2 cup of coffee and smoking cigarettes until their lungs were ready to give.
(I never had a cigarette myself, opting instead to sit in a corner seat and hope that I could avoid as much smoke as possible, but drained too many coffee pots on my own.)
In 2012, the restaurant was sold to Rachel O'Leary. She updated things here and there; more often than not, things that were deserving of an update, decor that brought the java den into a slightly more modern age while still striving to keep the atmosphere intact, the sense of gezellig that was so routinely core to the Caffé experience. It worked for a while; I maintain my thought that exposing the brick behind the bar and removing part of the gorgeous landscape (pictured in part above) was what shattered the illusion, for the four people who care.
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To try and quantify the effect Caffé had on a developing, 14-year-old Dylan would be impossible. There are a hundred things I could list, ways in which I became a better, more faceted individual, and there would be countless more I'd forgotten in the process.
Caffé was the place to be if you were a cool high-schooler, and the folks I was hanging out with apparently considered me cool enough to come along. The "Smoking Permitted" sign still hung on the wall near the cigarette dispenser sidled up just inside the door when I first went there. Though some romanticize the idea of the "smoke-clouded coffee house," in my freshman year, Caffé was exactly that: a bastion of nicotine and chili con queso, twin aromas mingling together as conversation and Columbian Supremo flowed. I had my first cup of coffee there, wrote the first words of several stories there and half a million more in the successive years, pages and notebooks all coffee-stained in one way or another.
Caffé turned me into a coffee drinker: not the kind of person who takes three packets of sugar and a fistful of creamers, but a black-as-the-night, steaming hot coffee drinker. It gave me an appreciation for the nature of a conversation that can come about when the only thing between you and the person on the other side of the table is two cups of Tanzania Peaberry. It was a haven for a cadre of care-free stoners who got out of school early, burned a bowl and proceeded to guzzle down frankly irresponsible amounts of java. There were places we'd go occasionally, and others we'd "frequent," but Caffé Espresso was a constant, a four-or-five-days-a-week locale.
It's likely that I spent more time there drinking coffee than I did doing homework anywhere.
I made friends there, turning acquaintances and friends-of-friends into brothers I would take bullets for. We hashed out close to half of a too-long parody-laden musical at the third (and fourth) hightop from the door. So many laughs were stifled as we tried to keep our THC-addled selves composed each time any one of the wonderful waitresses would pass by to check up on us. I ingested my body weight in sicilian chicken, gyro meat and tortilla chips. My first legal drink (and subsequent shots) was delivered in Caffé Espresso - and, okay, a few less-than-legal ones. The bartenders were nice. I don't remember if that first drink was an Edmund Fitzgerald or not, but that was certainly on the list that evening. A number of equally awkward dates took place there; the location was never the problem, but the highlight.
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When the Stratinis graduated and began moving across the state and further, Caffé's influence became less overt. It became a place of reunion and recollection for most, but stayed ever strong in housing me and my wistful desire to write (and finish!) the first draft of a too-long fantasy novel that, I swear, I'm going to finish editing one of these days. It just won't be finished at that third hightop.
I won't pretend like I've been going there constantly for the last ten years and this just suddenly snuck up on me; last night was the first time I'd been there in a while, and a substantial part of me feels pretty terrible about that. The feelings that broiled in me as I sat down for a brief moment at the same stool I'd sat in hundreds of times before were painful, weighed down with so many memories and conversations that future generations won't be able to replicate.
As I left the coffee shop that a part of me grew up in for the last time, I shook Jaime Wilson's hand and thanked him for the heart and soul he put into the building. He pulled me in for a hug and returned the sentiment. I shed a tear.
I miss you already, Caffé Espresso: the Rancilio machine, the neon Roasted Coffee sign, the inexplicable 70's concert poster for Joaquin Carbonell (with opener Iñaki Fernandez). I miss the gezellig that could only be felt once I passed through the inner entrance door. I have a coffee mug, a floor tile, and a thousand memories to remember you by, but that will never be enough. I feel older, now that you're gone.
Please don't let your new owner turn you into another loud, shitty bar. Green Bay has enough of those.
With love, always and forever,
Dylan
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